The column below shows why I post Kunstler's column every week.
Kunstler: Fed Cred Dead.
T he economy is a two-headed monster. One head is the trade in real goods and real services. The other head is the financialized traffic in swindles and frauds that surrounds banking. There is some deception and overlap about which is which. For instance so-called health care might be perceived as a real service. In fact, it’s a hostage racket, designed to victimize “patients” at their weakest, with a “protection” premium that easily runs to $12,000-a-year for a married couple, even when they aren’t sick, and vulnerable. Just see what happens if you go to an emergency room with an injury that requires six stitches. Next stop: re-po land.
Most of the remaining on-the-ground economy consists of people merely driving their cars absurd distances, burning gasoline, between exquisitely-tuned giant warehouse store operations that were designed to destroy local Main Street trade — and accomplished that, by the way, to the applause of the local citizens whose towns were destroyed (“We want bargain shopping!”).
Now, of course, even WalMart is looking over its shoulder at the collapse of the complex arrangements that allowed it to metastasize across North America like some cancerous fungus. Globalism is winding down as the gargantuan matrix of Ponzi schemes based on owed money dissolves debt by debt. It isn’t long before nobody is a credit-worthy borrower, and no transaction in real goods can be risked unless cash hits the barrelhead — which turns out to be a very awkward way of doing business.
It’s especially like this these days in the so-called “emerging markets” — e.g. places in the world with large populations of willing factory slaves. The traffic in shipping-out containers full of flat screen TVs (or shipping-in the raw materials to make them) won’t work very well without letters-of-credit, which are promises between banks to make sure that the stuff on the receiving end gets paid for. That becomes difficult when national currencies drop 3.5 percent in value one day and then 4 percent another day, and so on. An eight-year-old can figure out how that math works.
My new theory of history applies well to the macro situation: people do what they do because it seems like a good idea at the time.
For instance, a few decades ago, the suburban / “consumer” arrangement of daily life seemed like a good idea. You buy cheap land twenty-seven miles outside what used to be a functioning (now obsolete) city. Build lots and lots of houses out of cheap, shitty materials such as strand-board and vinyl, pave a lot of new roads, line many of them with even shittier strip-mall buildings and Big Box “power centers,” and there you have a wonderful basis for an economy. That was more or less the Ronald Reagan Utopia.
Now it’s all aging badly, fraying, too costly to fix and, increasingly, not worth scraping off the land and replacing with a new cheap, shitty building. The younger generation doesn’t even want to live in that suburban dystopia. They run shrieking from it to Brooklyn, or even downtown Troy, New York, up the Hudson River Valley. Alas, this younger generation has also been broadly victimized by the college loan racket — reinforced by the revised bankruptcy laws that make it impossible to ever write-off this sort of debt. When will they get political about it? Their debt loads will disfigure their lives as surely as a tour of duty in Vietnam would have forty years ago. Perhaps Siri has not informed them about this.
Last week was the watershed for central banking and for the illusion that the current disposition of things has a future. The Federal Reserve blinked on its long-touted Fed funds interest rate hike and chairperson Janet Yellen was left standing naked in the hot glare of her own carbonizing credibility, a pitiful larval creature, still maundering about “the data,” and “the median growth projection,” and other previously-owned figments spun out of the great PhD wonk machine in the Eccles Building.
The Federal Reserve itself is the victim du jour of its own grandiose fatuous fecklessness, in particular the idea that it could play a national economy like a three-button flugelhorn. What seemed like a good idea at the time when Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke stepped into the pilot house now just looks like the fraud of frauds: enabling corporations to borrow ever more money from the future to pretend that their balance sheets are sound. That scam is has nowhere left to go, except into the black hole that has been waiting for it. All the Fed really has left is to destroy the value of the dollar (to save it! Just like Vietnam!).
This ought to be an interesting week in the financial markets as the players have had a long, anxious weekend to absorb the death of Fed cred. And October, too. Expect dramatic re-pricing. Sometime a few months down the line, financial markets will present a “relief rally.” Don’t get suckered on that one.
Meanwhile, what remains on the other head of this two-headed economy besides driving to-and-from the Walmart? Pornography? The tattoo industry? Meth and narcotics? Prostitution? Professional sports on the flat screen? Kim and Kanye? Grand theft auto? Do you really think Donald Trump can fix this?
Monday, September 21, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
"The Last Honest Film Critic in America."
"'The Last Honest Film Critic in America': Armond White and the Children of James Baldwin" by @CU_History D.McNeil http://t.co/JCUG9uDsiX
— Dominique Marshall (@Dominiq92516944) September 14, 2015Alexander Cockburn, Thou Shouldst Be Alive at This Hour...
What would Alexander Cockburn have made of the 2016 presidential race--especially the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders-- or the Charleston church shooting? We have a good idea but his commentary is missed.
A warts-and-all review of A Colossal Wreck by Paul Berman.
A warts-and-all review of A Colossal Wreck by Paul Berman.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Phylls Hyman: "Be Careful How You Treat My Love."
Just about everything Phyllis Hyman sang is wonderful. She's one of my favorite singers.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Kunstler: The Parties Crawl Off to Die.
Soon I'll have a post about why I post Kunstler's column, given his misanthropy. For now, he pronounces a pox on both parties.
Kunstler: The Parties Crawl Off to Die.
The Parties Crawl Off to Die
I‘ve alluded to being a registered Democrat now and again, a disclosure that makes some readers go feral with wrath. For years I could only justify it as formal opposition to the cretinous brand of Republicanism that washed over the country like a septic wave with the reign of that sainted pompadour-in-search-of-a-brain, Ronald Reagan, whose “morning in America” bromide was among the biggest whoppers of my lifetime. With Reagan, we got the officially-sanctioned marriage of right wing politics and the most moronic strains of Southland evangelical religiosity. (Ronnie stated more than once his belief that Biblical “end times” were close at hand, which should have raised the question of his actual concern for the nation’s future — did he think it had one? — but nobody ever asked him about it.) George H. W. Bush expressed a similar view, perhaps merely pandering to the dolts of Dixie.
So, who in his right mind could have subscribed to that load of bullshit?
Meanwhile, the youthful and magnetic Clintons came on in 1992. They put on a good show of national stewardship in the early going. Bill could speak English fluently, unlike his two predecessors. Hillary’s committee to tackle health care reform came to grief, but the effort at least implied a recognition that medicine was turning into a shameless racket (now fully metastasized). Bill managed to shove through a species of welfare reform — remarkable for a Democrat — that has since deliquesced back into a swamp of disability fraud. But the Clinton turning point was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency.
Add to that now the signal failures of Barack Obama: 1) no prosecution or attempted regulation of widespread financial misdeeds 2) no effort to counter the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to buy elections; 3) no end to dubious military operations in distant lands, and 4) healthcare “reform” that only fortified the existing rackets — take all that together and you can only recoil from whatever it means to be a Democrat.
And now the return of Hillary, gliding above the election arena like Rodan the Flying Reptile — caw! caw! Get me outa here! It’s not just her, of course. It’s the whole disgusting circus parade of identity politics, and PC witch-hunting, and trans-sex drum-beating, and girl-lugging-a-mattress-around-campus idiocy, and blame-it-all-on-Whitey whinging, and drone-strike-du-jour warfare, and out-of-control NSA surveillance monkey business, plus throw in the outrageous scams of “civil forfeiture” under a president who was supposedly a professor of constitutional law — the list of Democratic-sponsored absurdities and turpitudes gives me the vapors.
The New York Times ran a front-page story Sunday saying that the Republican nomination-chasers were sounding too ominous, too dark, about the state of the nation, at least for the purpose of getting elected. As if the Times has an interest in them succeeding. I guess they were “just sayin’.” For my money, you can’t paint a dark enough picture to fully capture the decadence and depravity in the current zeitgeist. This, after all, is the basic appeal of Trump — though a panoramic shot of his supporters in one of those stadium love-fests suggests that their very demeanor is a big part of the problem: crowds of overfed tattooed clowns in nursery togs clamoring for a return to 1956. Good luck with that.
More than once I’ve referred to the earlier period in US history, the 1850s, when the political compass points shook loose and parties died. The Whigs disappeared altogether (and fast!) and the Democrats became a rump party of southern slavers. Well, the two major parties of our time are now perfectly poised to enter the Temple Grandin cattle chute of death. But history doesn’t repeat, of course, it only rhymes, and this time there are no other political parties standing by to take their place, no credible institutions, certainly no one like Lincoln. There are only Bernie Sanders and the execrable Trump.
Sanders functions nicely as a foil to the flying reptile. But the self-labeled socialist has a big problem. The public may be simmering with grievance, but my guess is that they are not especially hot for more redistribution of the national wealth — that is, whatever little remains in the hands of a sore beset former middle class. The absence of any other reputible figure on the Democratic “bench” belies a party now more hollow than a supermarket Easter egg.
What we see gathering is a political storm as perfect as the typhoon that has formed in banking. Surely the financial storm will strike first and it will leave the public stupefied with loss. I would not even bet against the possibility of the 2016 selection being canceled in some manner. Imagine, for instance, what the Pentagon brass thinks of Trump. And what they are planning for him. Just sayin’.
Kunstler: The Parties Crawl Off to Die.
The Parties Crawl Off to Die
I‘ve alluded to being a registered Democrat now and again, a disclosure that makes some readers go feral with wrath. For years I could only justify it as formal opposition to the cretinous brand of Republicanism that washed over the country like a septic wave with the reign of that sainted pompadour-in-search-of-a-brain, Ronald Reagan, whose “morning in America” bromide was among the biggest whoppers of my lifetime. With Reagan, we got the officially-sanctioned marriage of right wing politics and the most moronic strains of Southland evangelical religiosity. (Ronnie stated more than once his belief that Biblical “end times” were close at hand, which should have raised the question of his actual concern for the nation’s future — did he think it had one? — but nobody ever asked him about it.) George H. W. Bush expressed a similar view, perhaps merely pandering to the dolts of Dixie.
So, who in his right mind could have subscribed to that load of bullshit?
Meanwhile, the youthful and magnetic Clintons came on in 1992. They put on a good show of national stewardship in the early going. Bill could speak English fluently, unlike his two predecessors. Hillary’s committee to tackle health care reform came to grief, but the effort at least implied a recognition that medicine was turning into a shameless racket (now fully metastasized). Bill managed to shove through a species of welfare reform — remarkable for a Democrat — that has since deliquesced back into a swamp of disability fraud. But the Clinton turning point was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency.
Add to that now the signal failures of Barack Obama: 1) no prosecution or attempted regulation of widespread financial misdeeds 2) no effort to counter the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allows corporations to buy elections; 3) no end to dubious military operations in distant lands, and 4) healthcare “reform” that only fortified the existing rackets — take all that together and you can only recoil from whatever it means to be a Democrat.
And now the return of Hillary, gliding above the election arena like Rodan the Flying Reptile — caw! caw! Get me outa here! It’s not just her, of course. It’s the whole disgusting circus parade of identity politics, and PC witch-hunting, and trans-sex drum-beating, and girl-lugging-a-mattress-around-campus idiocy, and blame-it-all-on-Whitey whinging, and drone-strike-du-jour warfare, and out-of-control NSA surveillance monkey business, plus throw in the outrageous scams of “civil forfeiture” under a president who was supposedly a professor of constitutional law — the list of Democratic-sponsored absurdities and turpitudes gives me the vapors.
The New York Times ran a front-page story Sunday saying that the Republican nomination-chasers were sounding too ominous, too dark, about the state of the nation, at least for the purpose of getting elected. As if the Times has an interest in them succeeding. I guess they were “just sayin’.” For my money, you can’t paint a dark enough picture to fully capture the decadence and depravity in the current zeitgeist. This, after all, is the basic appeal of Trump — though a panoramic shot of his supporters in one of those stadium love-fests suggests that their very demeanor is a big part of the problem: crowds of overfed tattooed clowns in nursery togs clamoring for a return to 1956. Good luck with that.
More than once I’ve referred to the earlier period in US history, the 1850s, when the political compass points shook loose and parties died. The Whigs disappeared altogether (and fast!) and the Democrats became a rump party of southern slavers. Well, the two major parties of our time are now perfectly poised to enter the Temple Grandin cattle chute of death. But history doesn’t repeat, of course, it only rhymes, and this time there are no other political parties standing by to take their place, no credible institutions, certainly no one like Lincoln. There are only Bernie Sanders and the execrable Trump.
Sanders functions nicely as a foil to the flying reptile. But the self-labeled socialist has a big problem. The public may be simmering with grievance, but my guess is that they are not especially hot for more redistribution of the national wealth — that is, whatever little remains in the hands of a sore beset former middle class. The absence of any other reputible figure on the Democratic “bench” belies a party now more hollow than a supermarket Easter egg.
What we see gathering is a political storm as perfect as the typhoon that has formed in banking. Surely the financial storm will strike first and it will leave the public stupefied with loss. I would not even bet against the possibility of the 2016 selection being canceled in some manner. Imagine, for instance, what the Pentagon brass thinks of Trump. And what they are planning for him. Just sayin’.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Late Summer
It's still summer, with hot, humid weather. The presidential race is the most tumultuous one in memory. And the movies at the theater tend to be the studios' dregs.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
The New York Times: National Geographic and Fox are forming a commercial media company.
A landscaping crew is cutting down a tall albizia tree on the property across the road.
A landscaping crew is cutting down a tall albizia tree on the property across the road.
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Much to Consider About...
*charter schools
*the higher education system
*the refugee crisis in Europe
*the higher education system
*the refugee crisis in Europe
Monday, September 07, 2015
On Migrants and Refugees
For a different take on migration from Kunstler's: Resilience.org: "Migrants and Refugees."
In other words, it is possible to read the current social and political dynamic about migrants as a short term response to the peak of population growth and the economic squeeze on the majority of people in richer economies caused by neoliberalism. It’s ugly while it lasts, but it’s possible that it’s close to its height right now. On this version. the narrative about economic gains will start to reassert itself as the demographic issues start to be felt. A decline in levels of inequality would also help.
Kunstler: There Goes Europe.
Kunstler: There Goes Europe.
The desperate wish in what is loosely called the West to at least appear morally correct is unfortunately over-matched by the desperation of people fleeing unstable, overpopulated places outside the West, and it is a fiasco beyond even the events of the moment.
The refugee / immigrant crisis around the Mediterranean is a preview of a horror show to which there is no end in sight, and is certain to escalate. So anyone who indulges in fantasies about organizing an orderly, rational distribution of displaced persons for the current wave, is badly missing the point. Wave beyond wave awaits after the this one. And then what will the well-intentioned sentimentalists say? We wanted to do the right thing… we meant well… we cried when we saw the little boy dead on the beach….
Yes, the tragic intrusions of the US military in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere have been reckless and stupid. But that is not the whole story. The desert nations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have populations abnormally swollen by a century of oil-and-gas-based agriculture, really by the benefits of Modernity in general. Now that the oil age is chugging to an unruly crack-up, and Modernity with it, and the earth’s climate is doing wonky things, and the rich nations to the north have faked their finances to the point of bankruptcy, well, circumstances have changed.
In the years ahead, populations will be fleeing and shifting from many more unfavorable corners of the world. The pressures are mounting all over. Alas, the richer nations in which the fleeing poor aspire to gain a foothold, will also be contending with the disabling effects of a universal economic contraction — the winding down of the techno-industrial system and the global economy with it. That process has the potential to shatter political unions, overthrow established social orders, and provoke wars between the demoralized countries who still possess dangerous military hardware. At the least, it will produce economic conditions in Europe and North America probably worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
So, the idea that the nations currently bethinking themselves “rich” can take in, shelter, and employ the masses fleeing MENA (and elsewhere) is absurd. Somehow the people in charge, plus the intellectual classes who shape opinion and consensus, are going to have to arrive at some clear notion of limits and boundaries. It is actually happening in parts of Europe right now, extempore, where the immediate crisis is worst, for the moment in Italy, Greece, and Hungary — which first interned the refugees and then let them loose on the road to Vienna, probably only a way-station to Germany. Soon all nations across Europe will be agonizing, shucking, jiving, or improvising some sort of desperate response.
Among other confusions of policy and intention, the public “debate” so far does not make any distinction between true political refugees fleeing for their lives or economic migrants seeking to improve their prospects elsewhere. It is surely easy to empathize with both categories of persons, but that doesn’t mean you give up the control of your borders just to make yourself feel better. That is pretty much what has happened in the USA, where the Left, for political expediency, has deemed it indecent to call “illegal” immigrants what they are, and the Right has just been pusillanimous and hypocritical about it. Hence the unfiltered persona of Trump who, for all his titanic shortcomings, has at least managed to make his rivals look like the craven midgets they are.
Likewise, the rise of Marine LePen in France, Geert Wilders in Holland, and other parties seeking limits to immigration, perhaps even deportations. Personally, I reject the idea that it’s “racist” to want to preserve one’s national culture and character (especially in language), or to favor bona fide citizens for gainful employment. Europe has the additional obvious problem of an immigrant Islamic population overtly hostile to European culture and tradition. Why is it morally imperative for Europeans to countenance what amounts to low-grade warfare?
The situation that smoldered for decades is now exploding. Don’t expect to see any end to desperation and instability in MENA, but do expect new demographic crises out of other regions: Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, West Africa, and Brazil, with its cratering economy. It’s not inconceivable that China might bust apart politically, with centrifugal consequences. The global economy is contracting. We have indeed attained the limits to growth. Cheap oil is bygone and the capital infrastructure we have won’t run on expensive oil — including the oil industry itself. New technology or further central bank legerdemain is not going to fix that. We’re in population overshoot and a scramble is underway to bail on the places that just can’t support the people who live there. National boundaries will be defended. Sentimentalists will have to step aside. History is not a bedtime story about bunnies and kittens.
The desperate wish in what is loosely called the West to at least appear morally correct is unfortunately over-matched by the desperation of people fleeing unstable, overpopulated places outside the West, and it is a fiasco beyond even the events of the moment.
The refugee / immigrant crisis around the Mediterranean is a preview of a horror show to which there is no end in sight, and is certain to escalate. So anyone who indulges in fantasies about organizing an orderly, rational distribution of displaced persons for the current wave, is badly missing the point. Wave beyond wave awaits after the this one. And then what will the well-intentioned sentimentalists say? We wanted to do the right thing… we meant well… we cried when we saw the little boy dead on the beach….
Yes, the tragic intrusions of the US military in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere have been reckless and stupid. But that is not the whole story. The desert nations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have populations abnormally swollen by a century of oil-and-gas-based agriculture, really by the benefits of Modernity in general. Now that the oil age is chugging to an unruly crack-up, and Modernity with it, and the earth’s climate is doing wonky things, and the rich nations to the north have faked their finances to the point of bankruptcy, well, circumstances have changed.
In the years ahead, populations will be fleeing and shifting from many more unfavorable corners of the world. The pressures are mounting all over. Alas, the richer nations in which the fleeing poor aspire to gain a foothold, will also be contending with the disabling effects of a universal economic contraction — the winding down of the techno-industrial system and the global economy with it. That process has the potential to shatter political unions, overthrow established social orders, and provoke wars between the demoralized countries who still possess dangerous military hardware. At the least, it will produce economic conditions in Europe and North America probably worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.
So, the idea that the nations currently bethinking themselves “rich” can take in, shelter, and employ the masses fleeing MENA (and elsewhere) is absurd. Somehow the people in charge, plus the intellectual classes who shape opinion and consensus, are going to have to arrive at some clear notion of limits and boundaries. It is actually happening in parts of Europe right now, extempore, where the immediate crisis is worst, for the moment in Italy, Greece, and Hungary — which first interned the refugees and then let them loose on the road to Vienna, probably only a way-station to Germany. Soon all nations across Europe will be agonizing, shucking, jiving, or improvising some sort of desperate response.
Among other confusions of policy and intention, the public “debate” so far does not make any distinction between true political refugees fleeing for their lives or economic migrants seeking to improve their prospects elsewhere. It is surely easy to empathize with both categories of persons, but that doesn’t mean you give up the control of your borders just to make yourself feel better. That is pretty much what has happened in the USA, where the Left, for political expediency, has deemed it indecent to call “illegal” immigrants what they are, and the Right has just been pusillanimous and hypocritical about it. Hence the unfiltered persona of Trump who, for all his titanic shortcomings, has at least managed to make his rivals look like the craven midgets they are.
Likewise, the rise of Marine LePen in France, Geert Wilders in Holland, and other parties seeking limits to immigration, perhaps even deportations. Personally, I reject the idea that it’s “racist” to want to preserve one’s national culture and character (especially in language), or to favor bona fide citizens for gainful employment. Europe has the additional obvious problem of an immigrant Islamic population overtly hostile to European culture and tradition. Why is it morally imperative for Europeans to countenance what amounts to low-grade warfare?
The situation that smoldered for decades is now exploding. Don’t expect to see any end to desperation and instability in MENA, but do expect new demographic crises out of other regions: Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, West Africa, and Brazil, with its cratering economy. It’s not inconceivable that China might bust apart politically, with centrifugal consequences. The global economy is contracting. We have indeed attained the limits to growth. Cheap oil is bygone and the capital infrastructure we have won’t run on expensive oil — including the oil industry itself. New technology or further central bank legerdemain is not going to fix that. We’re in population overshoot and a scramble is underway to bail on the places that just can’t support the people who live there. National boundaries will be defended. Sentimentalists will have to step aside. History is not a bedtime story about bunnies and kittens.
Saturday, September 05, 2015
PG-13: The Barney Miller
I've never heard of this group till now.
From Rollin' Wit Da PG (Pump, 1990).
From Rollin' Wit Da PG (Pump, 1990).
Friday, September 04, 2015
Thursday, September 03, 2015
Death Row Records Movie Underway
Following the success of 'Straight Outta Compton," a Death Row biopic is underway: http://t.co/I24yREH3Nr pic.twitter.com/tkatEVeVkh
— SAINT HERON (@SaintHeron) September 3, 2015Wednesday, September 02, 2015
I think I grew up hating Florida because everyone looked like Guy Fieri but acted like George Zimmerman.
— Eric Andre (@ericandre) August 6, 2015Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Marienkirche
I found this article through Longreads, an account from Art & Antiques about the restoration/forgery of the Marienkirche mural.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Kunstler: Say Goodbye to Normal
Kunstler: Say Goodbye to Normal
The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are dying.
They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.
What’s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for everything! I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.
Actually, we’ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That plus a long-term resource salvage operation.
All the grand movements of stock indexes and central banks are just a diverting sort of stagecraft within the larger pageant of this contraction. The governors of the Federal Reserve play the role of viziers in this comic melodrama. That is, they are exalted figures robed in magical Brooks Brothers summer poplin pretending to have supernatural power to control events. You can tell from their recent assembly out west — “A-holes at the J-hole” — that they are very much in doubt that their “powers” will continue to be taken seriously. This endless hand-wringing over a measily quarter-point interest rate hike is like some quarrel among alchemists as to whether a quarter-degree rise in temperature might render a lump of clay into a gold nugget.
What they do doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that a great deal of the notional “wealth” they conjured up over the past decade or so is about to vanish —poof! Perhaps that will look like a black magic act. That wealth seemed so real! The bulging portfolios with their exquisite allocations! The clever options! The cunning shorts. Especially the canny bets in dark derivative pools! All up in a vapor. The sad truth being it was never there in the first place. It was just an hallucination induced by the manipulation of markets and the criminal misrepresentation of statistics, especially the employment numbers.
There are rumors that the Grand Vizeress of all, Ms. Yellen, is flirting with possible indictment over the “leakage” of valuable information out of her inner circle to potential profiteers. Whoops. It may lead nowhere but to me it is an index of her more general loss of credibility. All year she has spouted supernaturally fallacious nonsense about how “the data” guides Fed decision-making. Only her data is contrary to what is actually happening in the pathetic Rube Goldberg contraption that the so-called US economy has become (Walmart + entitlements). Her “guidance” amounts to a lot of futile drum-beating on a turret of the Fed castle, hoping to make it rain prosperity. Her enigmatic utterances have kept financial markets in a narrow sideways channel most of the year until recently.
I’d say she’d lost her mojo, and the lesser viziers on the Fed board are looking more and more like the larval, sunken-chested dweebs that they really are. So where is the nation to turn? Why, to the great blustering Trump, with his “can-do” bombast about “making America great again.” What does he mean, exactly? Like, making America the way it was in 1958?” Behold: the return of the great steel rolling mills along the banks of the Monongahela (and so on)! Fuggeddabowdit. Ain’t gonna happen.
I have to say it again: prepare to get smaller and more local. Things on the grand level are not going to work out. Get your shit together locally, and do it in place that has some prospect for keeping on: a small town somewhere food can be grown and especially places near the inland waterways where some kind of commercial exchange might continue in the absence of the trucking industry. Sound outlandish? Okay then. Keep buying Tesla stock and party on, dudes. Hail the viziers in their star-and-planet bedizened Brooks Brother raiment. Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are dying.
They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.
What’s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for everything! I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.
Actually, we’ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That plus a long-term resource salvage operation.
All the grand movements of stock indexes and central banks are just a diverting sort of stagecraft within the larger pageant of this contraction. The governors of the Federal Reserve play the role of viziers in this comic melodrama. That is, they are exalted figures robed in magical Brooks Brothers summer poplin pretending to have supernatural power to control events. You can tell from their recent assembly out west — “A-holes at the J-hole” — that they are very much in doubt that their “powers” will continue to be taken seriously. This endless hand-wringing over a measily quarter-point interest rate hike is like some quarrel among alchemists as to whether a quarter-degree rise in temperature might render a lump of clay into a gold nugget.
What they do doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that a great deal of the notional “wealth” they conjured up over the past decade or so is about to vanish —poof! Perhaps that will look like a black magic act. That wealth seemed so real! The bulging portfolios with their exquisite allocations! The clever options! The cunning shorts. Especially the canny bets in dark derivative pools! All up in a vapor. The sad truth being it was never there in the first place. It was just an hallucination induced by the manipulation of markets and the criminal misrepresentation of statistics, especially the employment numbers.
There are rumors that the Grand Vizeress of all, Ms. Yellen, is flirting with possible indictment over the “leakage” of valuable information out of her inner circle to potential profiteers. Whoops. It may lead nowhere but to me it is an index of her more general loss of credibility. All year she has spouted supernaturally fallacious nonsense about how “the data” guides Fed decision-making. Only her data is contrary to what is actually happening in the pathetic Rube Goldberg contraption that the so-called US economy has become (Walmart + entitlements). Her “guidance” amounts to a lot of futile drum-beating on a turret of the Fed castle, hoping to make it rain prosperity. Her enigmatic utterances have kept financial markets in a narrow sideways channel most of the year until recently.
I’d say she’d lost her mojo, and the lesser viziers on the Fed board are looking more and more like the larval, sunken-chested dweebs that they really are. So where is the nation to turn? Why, to the great blustering Trump, with his “can-do” bombast about “making America great again.” What does he mean, exactly? Like, making America the way it was in 1958?” Behold: the return of the great steel rolling mills along the banks of the Monongahela (and so on)! Fuggeddabowdit. Ain’t gonna happen.
I have to say it again: prepare to get smaller and more local. Things on the grand level are not going to work out. Get your shit together locally, and do it in place that has some prospect for keeping on: a small town somewhere food can be grown and especially places near the inland waterways where some kind of commercial exchange might continue in the absence of the trucking industry. Sound outlandish? Okay then. Keep buying Tesla stock and party on, dudes. Hail the viziers in their star-and-planet bedizened Brooks Brother raiment. Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
Sunday, August 30, 2015
Saturday, August 29, 2015
The Dog Days Continue. In the Meantime...
Here's "Any Day Now" by Chuck Jackson. From the Inherent Vice soundtrack.
and X-Ray Pop, "Oh Oui J'Aime."
and X-Ray Pop, "Oh Oui J'Aime."
Friday, August 28, 2015
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Various Tweets
This culture of firing people for public statements that are irrelevant to their jobs is just totalitarian. https://t.co/tRrL80FchH
— Thaddeus Russell (@ThaddeusRussell) August 26, 2015No more fire, the water next time: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Global Warming and White Supremacy http://t.co/PBoJ2DluSP
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) August 22, 2015Huh. I think I just accidentally summed up my mission: " I like to write things people can understand, learn from & enjoy."
— Kate Theimer (@archivesnext) June 22, 2015Good political litmus test: Ask yourself, "Would I REALLY be surprised if this candidate proposed a Purge or Hunger Games?"
— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) August 26, 2015Dear everyone,
Don't use a work email address for anything but work. Not to cheat, not to order a book. Nothing. At. All.
#ashleymadisonhack
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) August 22, 2015Mata Tuatagaloa will today become the first female judge to be appointed to Samoa's Supreme Court http://t.co/wTerWYHNpM
— RNZ International (@RNZInews) August 26, 2015Monday, August 24, 2015
Kunstler column: "Worse Than Hitler."
Kunstler column: "Worse Than Hitler."
E ven the formerly august New York Times grants that Donald J. Trump has ignited a voter firestorm of grievance against a dumb show election process that rewards a craven avoidance of real issues. Immigration is actually a stand-in for the paralysis, incompetence, overreach, and bloatedness of government generally in our time — but it is a good doorway into the larger problem.
Immigration is a practical problem, with visible effects on-the-ground, easy to understand. I’m enjoying the Trump-provoked debate mostly because it is a pushback against the disgusting dishonesty of political correctness that has bogged down the educated classes in a swamp of sentimentality. For instance, Times Sunday Magazine staffer Emily Bazelon wrote a polemic last week inveighing against the use of the word “illegal” applied to people who cross the border without permission on the grounds that it “justifies their mistreatment.” One infers she means that sending them back where they came from equals mistreatment.
It’s refreshing that Trump is able to cut through this kind of tendentious crap. If that were his only role, it would be a good one, because political correctness is an intellectual disease that is making it impossible for even educated people to think — especially people who affect to be political leaders. Trump’s fellow Republicans are entertainingly trapped in their own cowardliness and it’s fun to watch them squirm.
But for me, everything else about Trump is frankly sickening, from his sneering manner of speech, to the worldview he reveals day by day, to the incoherence of his rhetoric, to the wolverine that lives on top of his head. The thought of Trump actually getting elected makes me wonder where Arthur Bremer is when we really need him.
Did any of you actually catch Trump’s performance last week at the so-called “town meeting” event in New Hampshire (really just a trumped-up pep rally)? I don’t think I miscounted that Trump told the audience he was “very smart” 23 times in the course of his remarks. If he really was smart, he would know that such tedious assertions only suggest he is deeply insecure about his own intelligence. After all, this is a man whose lifework has been putting up giant buildings that resemble bowling trophies, some of them in the service of one of the worst activities of our time, legalized gambling, which is based on the socially pernicious idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing.
I daresay that legalized gambling has had a possibly worse effect on American life the past three decades than illegal immigration. Gambling is a marginal activity for marginal people that belongs on the margins — the back rooms and back alleys. It was consigned there for decades because it was understood that it’s not healthy for the public to believe that it’s possible to get something for nothing, that it undermines perhaps the most fundamental principle of human life.
Trump’s verbal incoherence is really something to behold. He’s incapable of expressing a complete thought without venturing down a dendritic maze of digressions, often leading to an assertion of how much he is loved (another sign of insecurity). For example, when he attacked Jeb’s (no last name necessary) statement that we have to show Iraqi leaders that “we have skin in the game,” Trump invoked the “wounded warriors,” saying “I love them. They’re everywhere. They love me.” In the immortal words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”
Trump’s notion that he can push around world leaders such as Vladimir Putin by treating them as though they were president of the Cement Workers’ Union ought to give thoughtful people the vapors. It doesn’t seem to occur to Trump that other countries could easily get pugnacious towards us. He would have us in a world war before the inaugural parade was over.
The trouble is that it’s not inconceivable Trump could get elected. Farfetched, perhaps, but not out of the question. The USA is heading for a very rough patch of history — as those of you with your eyes on the stock indexes lately may suspect. The country stands an excellent chance of waking up some morning soon to discover it is broke and broken. When that happens, all the anxiety and animus will be focused on looking for scapegoats, and they are likely to be the wrong ones. World leaders considered Hitler a clown in the early going, too, you know. But the Germans were wild about him. He pushed a lot of the right buttons under the circumstances. Trump is worse than Hitler. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.] And the American people, alas, are now surely a worse lot of ignorant, raging, tattooed slobs than the German people were in 1933. Be very afraid.
----------------
In his 20 July column Kunstler wrote, "I’ve proposed for many years that we are all set up to welcome a red-white-and-blue, corn-pone Nazi political savior type. I don’t think Donald Trump is it. But he will be a stalking horse for a far more skillful demagogue when the time comes." Now he says "Trump is worse than Hitler." Is it America's nuclear arsenal that makes him say that? I know a lot of people who aren't "ignorant, raging, tattooed slobs." Kunstler should stay with his July assertion that Trump is just a foreshadowing of an even more charismatic, manipulative pol.
31 August update:
E ven the formerly august New York Times grants that Donald J. Trump has ignited a voter firestorm of grievance against a dumb show election process that rewards a craven avoidance of real issues. Immigration is actually a stand-in for the paralysis, incompetence, overreach, and bloatedness of government generally in our time — but it is a good doorway into the larger problem.
Immigration is a practical problem, with visible effects on-the-ground, easy to understand. I’m enjoying the Trump-provoked debate mostly because it is a pushback against the disgusting dishonesty of political correctness that has bogged down the educated classes in a swamp of sentimentality. For instance, Times Sunday Magazine staffer Emily Bazelon wrote a polemic last week inveighing against the use of the word “illegal” applied to people who cross the border without permission on the grounds that it “justifies their mistreatment.” One infers she means that sending them back where they came from equals mistreatment.
It’s refreshing that Trump is able to cut through this kind of tendentious crap. If that were his only role, it would be a good one, because political correctness is an intellectual disease that is making it impossible for even educated people to think — especially people who affect to be political leaders. Trump’s fellow Republicans are entertainingly trapped in their own cowardliness and it’s fun to watch them squirm.
But for me, everything else about Trump is frankly sickening, from his sneering manner of speech, to the worldview he reveals day by day, to the incoherence of his rhetoric, to the wolverine that lives on top of his head. The thought of Trump actually getting elected makes me wonder where Arthur Bremer is when we really need him.
Did any of you actually catch Trump’s performance last week at the so-called “town meeting” event in New Hampshire (really just a trumped-up pep rally)? I don’t think I miscounted that Trump told the audience he was “very smart” 23 times in the course of his remarks. If he really was smart, he would know that such tedious assertions only suggest he is deeply insecure about his own intelligence. After all, this is a man whose lifework has been putting up giant buildings that resemble bowling trophies, some of them in the service of one of the worst activities of our time, legalized gambling, which is based on the socially pernicious idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing.
I daresay that legalized gambling has had a possibly worse effect on American life the past three decades than illegal immigration. Gambling is a marginal activity for marginal people that belongs on the margins — the back rooms and back alleys. It was consigned there for decades because it was understood that it’s not healthy for the public to believe that it’s possible to get something for nothing, that it undermines perhaps the most fundamental principle of human life.
Trump’s verbal incoherence is really something to behold. He’s incapable of expressing a complete thought without venturing down a dendritic maze of digressions, often leading to an assertion of how much he is loved (another sign of insecurity). For example, when he attacked Jeb’s (no last name necessary) statement that we have to show Iraqi leaders that “we have skin in the game,” Trump invoked the “wounded warriors,” saying “I love them. They’re everywhere. They love me.” In the immortal words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”
Trump’s notion that he can push around world leaders such as Vladimir Putin by treating them as though they were president of the Cement Workers’ Union ought to give thoughtful people the vapors. It doesn’t seem to occur to Trump that other countries could easily get pugnacious towards us. He would have us in a world war before the inaugural parade was over.
The trouble is that it’s not inconceivable Trump could get elected. Farfetched, perhaps, but not out of the question. The USA is heading for a very rough patch of history — as those of you with your eyes on the stock indexes lately may suspect. The country stands an excellent chance of waking up some morning soon to discover it is broke and broken. When that happens, all the anxiety and animus will be focused on looking for scapegoats, and they are likely to be the wrong ones. World leaders considered Hitler a clown in the early going, too, you know. But the Germans were wild about him. He pushed a lot of the right buttons under the circumstances. Trump is worse than Hitler. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.] And the American people, alas, are now surely a worse lot of ignorant, raging, tattooed slobs than the German people were in 1933. Be very afraid.
----------------
In his 20 July column Kunstler wrote, "I’ve proposed for many years that we are all set up to welcome a red-white-and-blue, corn-pone Nazi political savior type. I don’t think Donald Trump is it. But he will be a stalking horse for a far more skillful demagogue when the time comes." Now he says "Trump is worse than Hitler." Is it America's nuclear arsenal that makes him say that? I know a lot of people who aren't "ignorant, raging, tattooed slobs." Kunstler should stay with his July assertion that Trump is just a foreshadowing of an even more charismatic, manipulative pol.
31 August update:
The post-Empire political theater of DONALD TRUMP is thrilling: destroying the G.O.P. and terrifying the U.S. press. pic.twitter.com/M1HbPY1seY
— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) August 27, 2015Sunday, August 23, 2015
On "Invasive" Species
The September issue of Harper's Magazine has three articles sure to spark conversations. Besides an essay on how college has sold its soul and a grumpy review of four of Manhattan's most expensive restaurants, there's a timely article by Andrew Cockburn, "Weed Whackers", on "invasive" plant species, and how the Monsanto company encourages the use of its product Roundup.
Be mindful -- Dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you only contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world. #MLK #RadicalKing
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) February 2, 2015Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Lionel Richie, "Love Will Find A Way."
I heard this song for the first time a few days ago.
From Can't Slow Down (1983).
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Straight Outta Compton
I went to the 3.45 showing of Straight Outta Compton today and found it to be the best movie I've seen this year.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Kunstler: True Believers
Kunstler: True Believers.
August 17, 2015
True Believers
There is a special species of idiot at large in the financial media space who believe absolutely in the desperate and tragic public relations bullshit that this society churns out to convince itself that the techno-industrial high life can continue indefinitely, despite the mandates of reality — in particular, the fairy tales about oil: we’re cruising to energy independence… the shale oil “miracle” will keep us driving to WalMart forever… our wells doth overflow as if this were Saudi America… don’t worry, be happy…!
Such a true believer is John Mauldin, the investment hustler and writer of the newsletter Thoughts From the Frontline, who called me out for obloquy in his latest edition. After dissing me, he said:
Mauldin is going to be very disappointed when he discovers that the vaunted efficiencies in shale drilling and fracking he’s hyping will only accelerate the depletion of wells which, at best, produce a few hundred barrels of oil a day, and only for the first year, after which they deplete by at least half that rate, and after four years are little better than “stripper” wells. The PR shills at Cambridge Energy Research (Dan Yergin’s propaganda mill for the oil industry) must have pumped a five-gallon jug of Kool-Aid down poor John’s craw. He believes every whopper they spin out — e.g. that “Right now, some US shale operators can break even at $10/barrel.”
The truth is the shale oil industry couldn’t make a profit at $100/barrel. The drilling and fracking boom that began around 2005 was paid for with high-risk, high-yield junk bond financing and other sketchy, poorly collateralized financing. Most of the earnings in the early years of shale oil came from flipping land leases to greater fools. Now that the price of oil has fallen by more than 50 percent in the past year, the prospect dims for that junk financing to be repaid. Since that was “bottom-of-the-barrel” financing, the odds are that the shale producers will have a very hard time finding more borrowed money to keep up the relentless pace of drilling needed to stay ahead of the short depletion rates. They are also running out “sweet spots” that are worth drilling.
We will look back on the shale oil frenzy of 2005 to 2015 as a very interesting industrial stunt borne of desperation. It gave a floundering industry something to do with all its equipment and its trained personnel, and it gave wishful hucksters something to wish for, but it never penciled-out economically. Shale oil production turned down in 2015 and the money will not be there to get the production back to where it was before the price crash. Ever.
Some additional uncomfortable truths should temper the manic fantasies of hypsters like Mauldin. One is that we are no longer in the cheap oil age. All the new oil available now is expensive oil — whether it’s Bakken shale or deep water or arctic oil — and it costs too much for our techno-industrial society to run on. That is why the world financial system is imploding: we can’t borrow enough money from the future to keep this game going, and we can’t pay back the money we’ve already borrowed. We have to get another game going, one consistent with contraction and with much lower energy use. But that is not an acceptable option to the people running things. They are determined to keep the current matrix of rackets going at all costs, and the certain result will be very messy collapse of economies and governments.
Industrial economies face a fatal predicament: Oil above $75/barrel crushes economies; under $75/barrel it crushes oil companies. We’ve oscillated back and forth between those conditions since 2005. The net effect in the USA is that the middle class is rapidly going broke. All the financial shenanigans aimed at propping up Wall Street and Potemkin stock markets was carried out at the expense of the middle class, now deprived of jobs, incomes, vocations, stability, and prospects. They may already be at the point where they can’t afford oil at any price. That “energy deflation” dynamic, in the words of Steve Ludlum at the Economic Undertow blog, is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that beats a path straight to epochal paradigm shift: get smaller, get local, get real, or get out.
The hypsters and hucksters won’t believe this until it jumps up and bites them on the lips. These are the same idiots who believe we are going to continue Happy Motoring by other means — self-driving, all-electric cars — and who think there is some reason for human beings to travel to other planets when we haven’t even demonstrated that we can plausibly continue life on this one.
As I averred last week, America is at the bottom of a self-knowledge low cycle in which we are incapable of constructing a coherent story about what is happening to us. The techno-industrial fiesta was such a special experience that we can’t believe it might be coming to an end. So, one option is to believe stories that have no basis in reality. As Tom McGuane wrote some forty years ago: “Life in the old USA gizzard had changed and only a clown could fail to notice. So being a clown was a possibility.”
August 17, 2015
True Believers
There is a special species of idiot at large in the financial media space who believe absolutely in the desperate and tragic public relations bullshit that this society churns out to convince itself that the techno-industrial high life can continue indefinitely, despite the mandates of reality — in particular, the fairy tales about oil: we’re cruising to energy independence… the shale oil “miracle” will keep us driving to WalMart forever… our wells doth overflow as if this were Saudi America… don’t worry, be happy…!
Such a true believer is John Mauldin, the investment hustler and writer of the newsletter Thoughts From the Frontline, who called me out for obloquy in his latest edition. After dissing me, he said:
“I have written for years that Peak Oil is nonsense. Longtime readers know that I’m a believer in ever-accelerating technological transformation, but I have to admit I did not see the exponential transformation of the drilling business as it is currently unfolding. The changes are truly breathtaking and have gone largely unnoticed.”
Mauldin is going to be very disappointed when he discovers that the vaunted efficiencies in shale drilling and fracking he’s hyping will only accelerate the depletion of wells which, at best, produce a few hundred barrels of oil a day, and only for the first year, after which they deplete by at least half that rate, and after four years are little better than “stripper” wells. The PR shills at Cambridge Energy Research (Dan Yergin’s propaganda mill for the oil industry) must have pumped a five-gallon jug of Kool-Aid down poor John’s craw. He believes every whopper they spin out — e.g. that “Right now, some US shale operators can break even at $10/barrel.”
The truth is the shale oil industry couldn’t make a profit at $100/barrel. The drilling and fracking boom that began around 2005 was paid for with high-risk, high-yield junk bond financing and other sketchy, poorly collateralized financing. Most of the earnings in the early years of shale oil came from flipping land leases to greater fools. Now that the price of oil has fallen by more than 50 percent in the past year, the prospect dims for that junk financing to be repaid. Since that was “bottom-of-the-barrel” financing, the odds are that the shale producers will have a very hard time finding more borrowed money to keep up the relentless pace of drilling needed to stay ahead of the short depletion rates. They are also running out “sweet spots” that are worth drilling.
We will look back on the shale oil frenzy of 2005 to 2015 as a very interesting industrial stunt borne of desperation. It gave a floundering industry something to do with all its equipment and its trained personnel, and it gave wishful hucksters something to wish for, but it never penciled-out economically. Shale oil production turned down in 2015 and the money will not be there to get the production back to where it was before the price crash. Ever.
Some additional uncomfortable truths should temper the manic fantasies of hypsters like Mauldin. One is that we are no longer in the cheap oil age. All the new oil available now is expensive oil — whether it’s Bakken shale or deep water or arctic oil — and it costs too much for our techno-industrial society to run on. That is why the world financial system is imploding: we can’t borrow enough money from the future to keep this game going, and we can’t pay back the money we’ve already borrowed. We have to get another game going, one consistent with contraction and with much lower energy use. But that is not an acceptable option to the people running things. They are determined to keep the current matrix of rackets going at all costs, and the certain result will be very messy collapse of economies and governments.
Industrial economies face a fatal predicament: Oil above $75/barrel crushes economies; under $75/barrel it crushes oil companies. We’ve oscillated back and forth between those conditions since 2005. The net effect in the USA is that the middle class is rapidly going broke. All the financial shenanigans aimed at propping up Wall Street and Potemkin stock markets was carried out at the expense of the middle class, now deprived of jobs, incomes, vocations, stability, and prospects. They may already be at the point where they can’t afford oil at any price. That “energy deflation” dynamic, in the words of Steve Ludlum at the Economic Undertow blog, is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that beats a path straight to epochal paradigm shift: get smaller, get local, get real, or get out.
The hypsters and hucksters won’t believe this until it jumps up and bites them on the lips. These are the same idiots who believe we are going to continue Happy Motoring by other means — self-driving, all-electric cars — and who think there is some reason for human beings to travel to other planets when we haven’t even demonstrated that we can plausibly continue life on this one.
As I averred last week, America is at the bottom of a self-knowledge low cycle in which we are incapable of constructing a coherent story about what is happening to us. The techno-industrial fiesta was such a special experience that we can’t believe it might be coming to an end. So, one option is to believe stories that have no basis in reality. As Tom McGuane wrote some forty years ago: “Life in the old USA gizzard had changed and only a clown could fail to notice. So being a clown was a possibility.”
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
Kunstler: The Spectacle So Far.
Kunstler: The Spectacle So Far.
Y es, there is such a thing as “the public,” a term that derives from the ancient Latin, populous (the people), via publicus (of the people), via old French, public — pertaining generally to the mass of adults dwelling in a polity, a society under (political) governance. In the USA, government is vested as a republic, also from the Latin, res publica, meaning the public thing, the vessel that contains the public.
I present these terms to clarify how our society is cracking up. The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it.
True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.
Societies that act as though they are hostage to these forces of degradation are able to pretend that they are helpless in the face of them; that the public bears no responsibility for its own choices or for the disintegration of the polity they live under. Hence, the current condition of the American public and its disgraceful government.
It’s not difficult to understand how Donald Trump becomes the instrument for the public’s wrath. Whatever his checkered career in land development amounts to, he is at least a freely-functioning and unfettered actor in the political arena. The public enjoys most of all his assertion of independence from the tremendous engine of grift that the republic has become. His arrant contempt for his rivals, and for the disgusting political process erected for the election contest, also thrills a big wad of the public. So far, his actual ideas for governing lack coherence, except for the rather general notion that uncontrolled immigration, and all the mendacious fakery associated with it, is a bad thing for the republic. Beyond that he offers only blustering claims that he is “very smart,” an “artist of deal-making,” a “patriot.”
Almost nothing so far can knock him down or take him out. Fox News tried in last week’s “debate” — which was not a debate at all, really, but a half-assed interrogation — by trying to set the female half of the public against him for his nasty remarks about women over the years. Of course, the dirty secret of both politics and the media is that the common backstage chatter among pols and TV news producers is every bit as vulgar and hateful as anything Trump said. In case you haven’t noticed, all of America has turned into a verbal sewer, especially the virtual public realm of television. I don’t remember anyone complaining about the comportment of the characters in Tony Soprano’s Badda-Bing Lounge. In fact, awards were heaped on the depiction of that behavior. That’s who we are now.
The rise and persistence of Trump raises a more pertinent question: why are all the other candidates such obvious shills for the implacable engine of grift that is destroying the Republic? Why has nobody with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, called bullshit on the basic operations of the machine? Why have no other persons of real stature stepped forward to challenge the suicidal dynamic of the age?
There are many cycles in history, politics, and economics. One in particular afflicts the American public today: we’re at a cycle low for comprehending what is happening to us. Sometimes societies know very well what is going on and communicate it superbly. Such was the case in the late 1700s when American leaders filed divorce from Great Britain. Can you imagine any of the clowns onstage for the Fox News “debate” playing a role in writing the Federalist Papers? Obviously, the public and its putative representatives today don’t have a clue what is happening. And then, necessarily, they don’t have a clue what to do about it.
The foregoing assumes that they are honorable persons, though, which may not be the case. This is the chief gripe against Hillary Clinton, of course: that she is an unprincipled monster of ambition and little more. That would be my take on her, for instance. Among the Republicans (as in party) only Rand Paul stands out as not appearing to be some kind of puppet shilling for the grift machine. After all, the party is the very embodiment of that machine. And by trying to play nicely in its arena, Rand Paul may lack the fortitude to attack it.
I’m with those who think that the 2016 election campaign is going to be a wild spectacle beyond the current imaginings of news media. I’m serenely convinced that, among other things, the banking system is going to implode so hard and fast well before the nominating conventions that the nation will be in a state of near chaos. What’s out there now is just a tired dumb-show replaying the shopworn themes of an era that is about to slam to a close.
Y es, there is such a thing as “the public,” a term that derives from the ancient Latin, populous (the people), via publicus (of the people), via old French, public — pertaining generally to the mass of adults dwelling in a polity, a society under (political) governance. In the USA, government is vested as a republic, also from the Latin, res publica, meaning the public thing, the vessel that contains the public.
I present these terms to clarify how our society is cracking up. The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it.
True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.
Societies that act as though they are hostage to these forces of degradation are able to pretend that they are helpless in the face of them; that the public bears no responsibility for its own choices or for the disintegration of the polity they live under. Hence, the current condition of the American public and its disgraceful government.
It’s not difficult to understand how Donald Trump becomes the instrument for the public’s wrath. Whatever his checkered career in land development amounts to, he is at least a freely-functioning and unfettered actor in the political arena. The public enjoys most of all his assertion of independence from the tremendous engine of grift that the republic has become. His arrant contempt for his rivals, and for the disgusting political process erected for the election contest, also thrills a big wad of the public. So far, his actual ideas for governing lack coherence, except for the rather general notion that uncontrolled immigration, and all the mendacious fakery associated with it, is a bad thing for the republic. Beyond that he offers only blustering claims that he is “very smart,” an “artist of deal-making,” a “patriot.”
Almost nothing so far can knock him down or take him out. Fox News tried in last week’s “debate” — which was not a debate at all, really, but a half-assed interrogation — by trying to set the female half of the public against him for his nasty remarks about women over the years. Of course, the dirty secret of both politics and the media is that the common backstage chatter among pols and TV news producers is every bit as vulgar and hateful as anything Trump said. In case you haven’t noticed, all of America has turned into a verbal sewer, especially the virtual public realm of television. I don’t remember anyone complaining about the comportment of the characters in Tony Soprano’s Badda-Bing Lounge. In fact, awards were heaped on the depiction of that behavior. That’s who we are now.
The rise and persistence of Trump raises a more pertinent question: why are all the other candidates such obvious shills for the implacable engine of grift that is destroying the Republic? Why has nobody with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, called bullshit on the basic operations of the machine? Why have no other persons of real stature stepped forward to challenge the suicidal dynamic of the age?
There are many cycles in history, politics, and economics. One in particular afflicts the American public today: we’re at a cycle low for comprehending what is happening to us. Sometimes societies know very well what is going on and communicate it superbly. Such was the case in the late 1700s when American leaders filed divorce from Great Britain. Can you imagine any of the clowns onstage for the Fox News “debate” playing a role in writing the Federalist Papers? Obviously, the public and its putative representatives today don’t have a clue what is happening. And then, necessarily, they don’t have a clue what to do about it.
The foregoing assumes that they are honorable persons, though, which may not be the case. This is the chief gripe against Hillary Clinton, of course: that she is an unprincipled monster of ambition and little more. That would be my take on her, for instance. Among the Republicans (as in party) only Rand Paul stands out as not appearing to be some kind of puppet shilling for the grift machine. After all, the party is the very embodiment of that machine. And by trying to play nicely in its arena, Rand Paul may lack the fortitude to attack it.
I’m with those who think that the 2016 election campaign is going to be a wild spectacle beyond the current imaginings of news media. I’m serenely convinced that, among other things, the banking system is going to implode so hard and fast well before the nominating conventions that the nation will be in a state of near chaos. What’s out there now is just a tired dumb-show replaying the shopworn themes of an era that is about to slam to a close.
Saturday, August 08, 2015
Anita Baker and James Ingram, "When You Love Someone"
From the soundtrack of Forget Paris. I've never heard or heard of this song before.
Friday, August 07, 2015
Thursday, August 06, 2015
Tuesday, August 04, 2015
Sound Recordings and Playback Machines
Unlike book libraries, libraries of recordings rely on machines for playback—and the machines are dying - http://t.co/MxOCYL1X8D
— Robert DelRossi (@rdelrossi) August 2, 2015Monday, August 03, 2015
Kunstler: Where Candidates Fear to Tread.
Kunstler: Where Candidates Fear to Tread.
That the snarkier circles of political commentary thrill to the elephantine bellowings of Donald J. Trump only shows the pathetic limitations of the snarkists. They enjoy Trump’s filterless mouth, his harsh goadings of the other presidential wannabes, and his supposed telepathic empathy for the suffering public outside the magic kingdom of DC.
Trump has one legitimate issue, immigration, plus a brief against the general incompetence of professional politicians, and a pocketful of grandiose claims about his majestic skills in business and deal-making. As business goes in this huckster’s paradise, being a real estate developer is perhaps one click above being a car-dealer, and the fact that some of Trump’s artful deals end up in bankruptcy court might argue against his self-proclaimed mastery. Hence, his relegation to the clown category.
What Trump represents most vividly in this moment of history is the astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights. No one so far, including the lovable Bernie Sanders, has nailed a proper bill of grievances to the White House gate. A broad roster of dire issues facing this society ought to be self-evident. But since they are absent so far in the public discussion, here is my list of matters that serious candidates should dare to talk about (all things that a sitting president could take action on):
The security state. America has developed the most horrifying state security apparatus that the world has ever seen in its NSA and associated agencies. It has become the sugar tit for some of the most malevolent enterprises of the corporatocracy — the black ops companies and the weapons dealers. The growth of this monster was not mandated by heaven. A president could lead the move to deconstruct it. A candidate with a decent respect for our heritage would make this a major campaign issue.
Related to this is the disgusting militarization of the police. Police forces in small towns have no business owning MRAP vehicles, tanks, and heavy weaponry. The federal government gave a lot of this stuff to them. Guess what? It can take the stuff back. Serious candidates should propose this.
There is a more general militarization of national life that ought to be disturbing to thoughtful citizens. I live near a US Naval base. I see enlisted men in town wearing desert camo uniforms on their time off. I resent this hugely. Military personnel at home have no business wearing war theater garb in a place where they are not at war. Historically, it was never before the case that US soldiers went about in battle dress at home. This disgusting trend has even been adopted in major league baseball. The New York Mets and the Pittsburgh Pirates have gone on TV wearing camo baseball uniforms. What are they trying to prove? That we are all at war all the time?
The pervasive racketeering in American life is destroying the country. Medical racketeering leads the way. Be very clear: it is a hostage racket. You are the hostage when you are sick or in need of treatment. You will probably agree to anything that will save your life. The medical racketeers know this. Hence, we live under the tyranny of the “Charge-master” pricing system that assigns ludicrous costs to everything doled out as “medicine,” with the pharmaceutical industry creaming off whatever remains. A trip to the ER with a broken arm can easily propel a household into financial ruin. A president could apply the antitrust laws to many of these rackets and practices. There is no excuse for failing to take a stand.
The most dangerous rackets of our time are those running through banking and finance. The superficially genial President Obama has done absolutely nothing to defend the public against gross financial misconduct and pervasive accounting fraud. His justice department has failed to prosecute widespread criminality in banking and his regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have sat on their hands for six years while markets are hijacked and manipulated. This behavior gives credence to a greater conspiracy between the governments, the “systemically important” banks, and the Federal Reserve to prop up a Potemkin financialized economy for political cover and favor at the expense of crumbling real economy. A potential president has got to swear to defend the public against these institutional turpitudes. A president can lead the way by proposing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall act and by directing the justice department to break up the “systemically important” banks before they implode the entire operating system of the global economy.
President Obama didn’t do a damn thing in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision issued by the Supreme Court. This decision endowed the alleged “personhood” of corporations with a “right” to express their political opinions by giving money in unlimited amounts to candidates. The decision has been a disaster, since it amounted to a “right” to buy elections. The “personhood” of corporations has evolved during the industrial age from a very circumscribed set of chartered practices to the very dubious realm of “personhood” privileges. The basic truth is that corporations do not have duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the public interest; only to their shareholders and boards of directors; and this condition should be self-evident to jurists. Hence, it is necessary to directly address by statute or constitutional amendment the limitations on the personhood of corporations. A president can lead the effort to do this via his party allies in congress.
Why has the foreign policy apparatus of the USA gone into the business of antagonizing Russia? How does it benefit the American people for its government to finance and direct a coup d’é·tat in Ukraine? Why did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cease to function. Some of the GOP candidates for president are sitting senators. Why doesn’t press inquire of their failure? Why is there no public discussion of this very disturbing policy?
President Obama promised in 2009 to put an end to the revolving door between government regulators and the entities they were regulating, banks in particular. He did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, he installed a revolving door at the White House, allowing the free movement of such rogues as Robert Rubin, Gary Gensler, Mary Jo White, and Larry Summers in and out of government. Such villains are destroying the nation. Any president with a shred of common decency could put an end to this practice.
There you have a few choice things to chew on. They go beyond mere inchoate rage and revulsion against politicians. They represent a very rich agenda of matters the country must attend to if it is going to survive. I wonder if the major media grandees who make up the debate questions will even think of these things.
That the snarkier circles of political commentary thrill to the elephantine bellowings of Donald J. Trump only shows the pathetic limitations of the snarkists. They enjoy Trump’s filterless mouth, his harsh goadings of the other presidential wannabes, and his supposed telepathic empathy for the suffering public outside the magic kingdom of DC.
Trump has one legitimate issue, immigration, plus a brief against the general incompetence of professional politicians, and a pocketful of grandiose claims about his majestic skills in business and deal-making. As business goes in this huckster’s paradise, being a real estate developer is perhaps one click above being a car-dealer, and the fact that some of Trump’s artful deals end up in bankruptcy court might argue against his self-proclaimed mastery. Hence, his relegation to the clown category.
What Trump represents most vividly in this moment of history is the astounding lack of seriousness among people who pretend to be political heavyweights. No one so far, including the lovable Bernie Sanders, has nailed a proper bill of grievances to the White House gate. A broad roster of dire issues facing this society ought to be self-evident. But since they are absent so far in the public discussion, here is my list of matters that serious candidates should dare to talk about (all things that a sitting president could take action on):
The security state. America has developed the most horrifying state security apparatus that the world has ever seen in its NSA and associated agencies. It has become the sugar tit for some of the most malevolent enterprises of the corporatocracy — the black ops companies and the weapons dealers. The growth of this monster was not mandated by heaven. A president could lead the move to deconstruct it. A candidate with a decent respect for our heritage would make this a major campaign issue.
Related to this is the disgusting militarization of the police. Police forces in small towns have no business owning MRAP vehicles, tanks, and heavy weaponry. The federal government gave a lot of this stuff to them. Guess what? It can take the stuff back. Serious candidates should propose this.
There is a more general militarization of national life that ought to be disturbing to thoughtful citizens. I live near a US Naval base. I see enlisted men in town wearing desert camo uniforms on their time off. I resent this hugely. Military personnel at home have no business wearing war theater garb in a place where they are not at war. Historically, it was never before the case that US soldiers went about in battle dress at home. This disgusting trend has even been adopted in major league baseball. The New York Mets and the Pittsburgh Pirates have gone on TV wearing camo baseball uniforms. What are they trying to prove? That we are all at war all the time?
The pervasive racketeering in American life is destroying the country. Medical racketeering leads the way. Be very clear: it is a hostage racket. You are the hostage when you are sick or in need of treatment. You will probably agree to anything that will save your life. The medical racketeers know this. Hence, we live under the tyranny of the “Charge-master” pricing system that assigns ludicrous costs to everything doled out as “medicine,” with the pharmaceutical industry creaming off whatever remains. A trip to the ER with a broken arm can easily propel a household into financial ruin. A president could apply the antitrust laws to many of these rackets and practices. There is no excuse for failing to take a stand.
The most dangerous rackets of our time are those running through banking and finance. The superficially genial President Obama has done absolutely nothing to defend the public against gross financial misconduct and pervasive accounting fraud. His justice department has failed to prosecute widespread criminality in banking and his regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have sat on their hands for six years while markets are hijacked and manipulated. This behavior gives credence to a greater conspiracy between the governments, the “systemically important” banks, and the Federal Reserve to prop up a Potemkin financialized economy for political cover and favor at the expense of crumbling real economy. A potential president has got to swear to defend the public against these institutional turpitudes. A president can lead the way by proposing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall act and by directing the justice department to break up the “systemically important” banks before they implode the entire operating system of the global economy.
President Obama didn’t do a damn thing in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United decision issued by the Supreme Court. This decision endowed the alleged “personhood” of corporations with a “right” to express their political opinions by giving money in unlimited amounts to candidates. The decision has been a disaster, since it amounted to a “right” to buy elections. The “personhood” of corporations has evolved during the industrial age from a very circumscribed set of chartered practices to the very dubious realm of “personhood” privileges. The basic truth is that corporations do not have duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the public interest; only to their shareholders and boards of directors; and this condition should be self-evident to jurists. Hence, it is necessary to directly address by statute or constitutional amendment the limitations on the personhood of corporations. A president can lead the effort to do this via his party allies in congress.
Why has the foreign policy apparatus of the USA gone into the business of antagonizing Russia? How does it benefit the American people for its government to finance and direct a coup d’é·tat in Ukraine? Why did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cease to function. Some of the GOP candidates for president are sitting senators. Why doesn’t press inquire of their failure? Why is there no public discussion of this very disturbing policy?
President Obama promised in 2009 to put an end to the revolving door between government regulators and the entities they were regulating, banks in particular. He did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, he installed a revolving door at the White House, allowing the free movement of such rogues as Robert Rubin, Gary Gensler, Mary Jo White, and Larry Summers in and out of government. Such villains are destroying the nation. Any president with a shred of common decency could put an end to this practice.
There you have a few choice things to chew on. They go beyond mere inchoate rage and revulsion against politicians. They represent a very rich agenda of matters the country must attend to if it is going to survive. I wonder if the major media grandees who make up the debate questions will even think of these things.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
American Journalism Review Ends
American Journalism Review to cease publication, archives and site to remain available http://t.co/Fc0h9mw13F http://t.co/OEEpDDkzvM
— Mediagazer (@mediagazer) July 31, 2015Saturday, August 01, 2015
Friday, July 31, 2015
A Few More Tweets
Among the last pre-Code films, FINISHING SCHOOL ('34) marks the end of Ginger Rogers' days as a supporting actor. pic.twitter.com/2mGbtrOtKa
— TCM (@tcm) July 30, 2015Apparently the last tweet of Toure Neblett, whose last day on MSNBC was today, 31 July, on the last episode of "The Cycle."
...I am very sorry and will make sure this doesn’t happen again.
— Touré (@Toure) May 27, 2014#peakoil World’s population to hit 9.7 BILLION by 2050 as India becomes largest country: The number of people ... http://t.co/1mempnUo12
— peak oil news (@peaktweat) July 29, 2015Ron Paul's New Book
Ron Paul discusses his new book Swords Into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity in this interview.
Twelve-term US Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul reveals an intensely personal side as he reflects on growing up during World War II. The book also provides a powerful critique of the corruption and corrosion produced by a 20th century full of war and killing. Ever the optimist, however, Paul leaves behind the ashes of a 20th century of war to finish with a stirring, liberating view of the future we may choose if we turn from war and violence.
Twelve-term US Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul reveals an intensely personal side as he reflects on growing up during World War II. The book also provides a powerful critique of the corruption and corrosion produced by a 20th century full of war and killing. Ever the optimist, however, Paul leaves behind the ashes of a 20th century of war to finish with a stirring, liberating view of the future we may choose if we turn from war and violence.
Firedoglake Closes
After 10 years, Firedoglake is coming to an end. @janehamsher on what's next: http://t.co/n7VJJH3ALw
#Shadowproof pic.twitter.com/DOFTHSBwmh
— Firedoglake (@firedoglake) July 30, 20151 August update: An interesting overview of the progressive blogosphere and the changes it's undergone over the years.
Monday, July 27, 2015
Various Tweets
Happy Birthday to Gilda Radner, a Smart Girl whose legacy continues to bring hope + laughter to millions worldwide 💕 pic.twitter.com/MsUJjAteKh
— AmyPoehlerSmartGirls (@smrtgrls) June 28, 2015Archivist Helen Selsdon loading more boxes of #HelenKeller materials to be digitized thanks to @NEHgov pic.twitter.com/eb8m1RQjkx
— AFB (@AFB1921) July 23, 2015Welcome to the Publishing in the Archives Profession Blog http://t.co/02ZoxgWCV3 Valuable insight for archivists who want to write
— Margot Note (@margotnote) July 23, 2015China’s Regulators Target Reality Shows in Latest TV Cleanup http://t.co/GImMgMdGtG
— Television Industry (@TelevisionToday) July 25, 2015Marlene Sanders, TV news reporter and executive, dies at 84 http://t.co/vpeNFpUsdb
— Television Industry (@TelevisionToday) July 17, 2015With all due respect to the people of Lafayette and all of us in ChattaVegas, you CANNOT arrest anyone because they MIGHT be dangerous.
— Karon Adams (@MilitaryRosary) July 24, 2015Hey @realDonaldTrump, I will proudly help host Miss USA if you're still needing someone! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #USA pic.twitter.com/AoCNHolmuI
— Andrea Neu (@neu7_neu) July 7, 2015(added 29 July)
There are 200 fewer black journalists in newspaper/online newsrooms in 2015 than in 2014 http://t.co/VjRJ0htrXJ pic.twitter.com/hV1vir6ecn
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) July 28, 2015Kunstler: Potemkin Party
I've been busy this week so I haven't posted much, but I plan to soon. In the meantime, here's Kunstler's latest.
Kunstler: Potemkin Party
July 27, 2015
Potemkin Party
How many of you brooding on the dreadful prospect of Hillary have chanced to survey what remains of Democratic Party (cough cough) leadership in the background of Her Royal Inevitableness? Nothing is the answer. Zip. Nobody. A vacuum. There is no Democratic Party anymore. There are no figures of gravitas anywhere to be found, no ideas really suited to the American prospect, nothing with the will to oppose the lumbering parasitic corporatocracy that is doing little more than cluttering up this moment in history while it sucks the last dregs of value from our society.
I say this as a lifelong registered Democrat but a completely disaffected one — who regards the Republican opposition as the mere errand boy of the above-named lumbering parasitic corporatocracy. Readers are surely chafing to insert that the Democrats have been no less errand boys (and girls) for the same disgusting zeitgeist, and they are surely correct in the case of Hillary, and indeed of the current President.
Readers are surely also chafing to insert that there is Bernie Sanders, climbing in the opinion polls, disdaining Wall Street money, denouncing the current disposition of things with the old union hall surliness we’ve grown to know and love. I’m grateful that Bernie is in the race, that he’s framing an argument against Ms. It’s My Turn. I just don’t happen to think that Bernie gets what the country — indeed what all of techno-industrial society — is really up against, namely a long emergency of economic contraction and collapse.
These circumstances require a very different agenda than just an I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill redistributionist scheme. Lively as Bernie is, I don’t think he offers much beyond that, as if cadging a little more tax money out of WalMart, General Mills, and Exxon-Mobil will fix what is ailing this sad-ass polity. The heart of the matter is that our way of life has shot its wad and now we have to live very differently. Almost nobody wants to even try to think about this.
I hugely resent the fact that the Democratic Party puts its time and energy into the stupid sexual politics of the day when it should be working on issues such as re-localizing commercial economies (rebuilding Main Streets), reforming agriculture to avoid the total collapse of corporate-industrial farming, and fixing the passenger rail system so people will have some way to get around the country when happy Motoring dies (along with commercial aviation).
The “to do” list for rearranging the basic systems of daily life in America is long and loaded with opportunity. Every system that is retooled contains jobs and social roles for people who have been shut out of the economy for two generations. If we do everything we can to promote smaller-scaled local farming, there will be plenty of work for lesser-skilled people to do and get paid for. Saying goodbye to the tyranny of Big Box commerce would open up vast vocational opportunities in reconstructed local and regional networks of commerce, especially for young people interested in running their own business. We need to prepare for localized clinic-style medicine (in opposition to the continuing amalgamation and gigantization of hospitals, with its handmaidens of Big Pharma and the insurance rackets). The train system has got to be reborn as a true public utility. Just about every other civilized country is already demonstrating how that is done — it’s not that difficult and it would employ a lot of people at every level. That is what the agenda of a truly progressive political party should be at this moment in history.
That Democrats even tolerate the existence of evil entities like WalMart is an argument for ideological bankruptcy of the party. Democratic Presidents from Carter to Clinton to Obama could have used the Department of Justice and the existing anti-trust statutes to at least discourage the pernicious monopolization of commerce that Big Boxes represented. By the same token, President Obama could have used existing federal law to break up the banking oligarchy starting in 2009, not to mention backing legislation to more crisply define alleged corporate “personhood” in the wake of the ruinous “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision of 2010. They don’t even talk about it because Wall Street owns them.
So, you fellow disaffected Democrats — those of you who can’t go over to the other side, but feel you have no place in your country’s politics — look around and tell me who you see casting a shadow on the Democratic landscape. Nobody. Just tired, corrupt, devious old Hillary and her nemesis Bernie the Union Hall Champion out of a Pete Seeger marching song.
I’ve been saying for a while that this period of history resembles the 1850s in America in two big ways: 1) our society faces a crisis, and 2) the existing political parties are not up to the task of comprehending what society faces. In the 1850s it was the Whigs that dried up and blew away (virtually overnight), while the old Democratic party just entered a 75-year wilderness of irrelevancy. God help us if Trump-o-mania turns out to be the only alternative.
Oh, by the way, notice that the lead editorial in Monday’s New York Times is a plea for transgender bathrooms in schools. What could be more important? For Transgender Americans, Legal Battles Over Restrooms.
Kunstler: Potemkin Party
July 27, 2015
Potemkin Party
How many of you brooding on the dreadful prospect of Hillary have chanced to survey what remains of Democratic Party (cough cough) leadership in the background of Her Royal Inevitableness? Nothing is the answer. Zip. Nobody. A vacuum. There is no Democratic Party anymore. There are no figures of gravitas anywhere to be found, no ideas really suited to the American prospect, nothing with the will to oppose the lumbering parasitic corporatocracy that is doing little more than cluttering up this moment in history while it sucks the last dregs of value from our society.
I say this as a lifelong registered Democrat but a completely disaffected one — who regards the Republican opposition as the mere errand boy of the above-named lumbering parasitic corporatocracy. Readers are surely chafing to insert that the Democrats have been no less errand boys (and girls) for the same disgusting zeitgeist, and they are surely correct in the case of Hillary, and indeed of the current President.
Readers are surely also chafing to insert that there is Bernie Sanders, climbing in the opinion polls, disdaining Wall Street money, denouncing the current disposition of things with the old union hall surliness we’ve grown to know and love. I’m grateful that Bernie is in the race, that he’s framing an argument against Ms. It’s My Turn. I just don’t happen to think that Bernie gets what the country — indeed what all of techno-industrial society — is really up against, namely a long emergency of economic contraction and collapse.
These circumstances require a very different agenda than just an I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill redistributionist scheme. Lively as Bernie is, I don’t think he offers much beyond that, as if cadging a little more tax money out of WalMart, General Mills, and Exxon-Mobil will fix what is ailing this sad-ass polity. The heart of the matter is that our way of life has shot its wad and now we have to live very differently. Almost nobody wants to even try to think about this.
I hugely resent the fact that the Democratic Party puts its time and energy into the stupid sexual politics of the day when it should be working on issues such as re-localizing commercial economies (rebuilding Main Streets), reforming agriculture to avoid the total collapse of corporate-industrial farming, and fixing the passenger rail system so people will have some way to get around the country when happy Motoring dies (along with commercial aviation).
The “to do” list for rearranging the basic systems of daily life in America is long and loaded with opportunity. Every system that is retooled contains jobs and social roles for people who have been shut out of the economy for two generations. If we do everything we can to promote smaller-scaled local farming, there will be plenty of work for lesser-skilled people to do and get paid for. Saying goodbye to the tyranny of Big Box commerce would open up vast vocational opportunities in reconstructed local and regional networks of commerce, especially for young people interested in running their own business. We need to prepare for localized clinic-style medicine (in opposition to the continuing amalgamation and gigantization of hospitals, with its handmaidens of Big Pharma and the insurance rackets). The train system has got to be reborn as a true public utility. Just about every other civilized country is already demonstrating how that is done — it’s not that difficult and it would employ a lot of people at every level. That is what the agenda of a truly progressive political party should be at this moment in history.
That Democrats even tolerate the existence of evil entities like WalMart is an argument for ideological bankruptcy of the party. Democratic Presidents from Carter to Clinton to Obama could have used the Department of Justice and the existing anti-trust statutes to at least discourage the pernicious monopolization of commerce that Big Boxes represented. By the same token, President Obama could have used existing federal law to break up the banking oligarchy starting in 2009, not to mention backing legislation to more crisply define alleged corporate “personhood” in the wake of the ruinous “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision of 2010. They don’t even talk about it because Wall Street owns them.
So, you fellow disaffected Democrats — those of you who can’t go over to the other side, but feel you have no place in your country’s politics — look around and tell me who you see casting a shadow on the Democratic landscape. Nobody. Just tired, corrupt, devious old Hillary and her nemesis Bernie the Union Hall Champion out of a Pete Seeger marching song.
I’ve been saying for a while that this period of history resembles the 1850s in America in two big ways: 1) our society faces a crisis, and 2) the existing political parties are not up to the task of comprehending what society faces. In the 1850s it was the Whigs that dried up and blew away (virtually overnight), while the old Democratic party just entered a 75-year wilderness of irrelevancy. God help us if Trump-o-mania turns out to be the only alternative.
Oh, by the way, notice that the lead editorial in Monday’s New York Times is a plea for transgender bathrooms in schools. What could be more important? For Transgender Americans, Legal Battles Over Restrooms.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Hermes
Hermes
Das erste Heft des Hermes. Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie erschien 1866 beim Verlag Weidmann in Berlin. Damit zählt der Hermes heute zu den altertumswissenschaftlichen Fachorganen mit der längsten Publikationstradition. Dem Herausgebergremium der Gründungszeit gehörten der Latinist Emil Hübner, der Gräzist Adolf Kirchhoff und der Althistoriker Theodor Mommsen an. In ihrer Nachfolge standen u.a. Georg Kaibel, Carl Robert, Georg Wissowa, Alfred Körte, Helmut Berve und Jochen Bleicken.
Außer Beiträgen zur klassischen Philologie veröffentlicht der Hermes traditionell auch Artikel aus verwandten Themengebieten der Altertumswissenschaften wie der Alten Geschichte, Archäologie, Epigraphik und Numismatik. So vermittelt die Zeitschrift ein Bild von der Vielfalt der Forschungen zur griechisch-römischen Antike nicht nur auf literatur- und sprachwissenschaftlichem, sondern auch auf historischem Gebiet.
Im peer-review Verfahren begutachtet, finden internationale Beiträge in der Zeitschrift eine weltweite Leserschaft.
The first issue of Hermes. Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie appeared in 1866 at the publishing house of Weidmann in Berlin, giving Hermes one of the longest publishing histories of any classical studies journal today. The original editorial board included the Latinist Emil Hübner, the Hellenist Adolf Kirchhoff and the ancient historian Theodor Mommsen. Among their successors were Georg Kaibel, Carl Robert, Georg Wissowa, Alfred Körte, Helmut Berve, and Jochen Bleicken.
In addition to scholarly articles on classical philology, Hermes also publishes articles from related fields in classical and ancient studies such as ancient history, archeology, epigraphy and numismatics. Thus, the journal provides a panorama of the wide variety of research on Greco-Roman antiquity from the perspectives of literature, languages and history.
This peer-reviewed journal reaches with its stimulating international papers a worldwide readership.
Das erste Heft des Hermes. Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie erschien 1866 beim Verlag Weidmann in Berlin. Damit zählt der Hermes heute zu den altertumswissenschaftlichen Fachorganen mit der längsten Publikationstradition. Dem Herausgebergremium der Gründungszeit gehörten der Latinist Emil Hübner, der Gräzist Adolf Kirchhoff und der Althistoriker Theodor Mommsen an. In ihrer Nachfolge standen u.a. Georg Kaibel, Carl Robert, Georg Wissowa, Alfred Körte, Helmut Berve und Jochen Bleicken.
Außer Beiträgen zur klassischen Philologie veröffentlicht der Hermes traditionell auch Artikel aus verwandten Themengebieten der Altertumswissenschaften wie der Alten Geschichte, Archäologie, Epigraphik und Numismatik. So vermittelt die Zeitschrift ein Bild von der Vielfalt der Forschungen zur griechisch-römischen Antike nicht nur auf literatur- und sprachwissenschaftlichem, sondern auch auf historischem Gebiet.
Im peer-review Verfahren begutachtet, finden internationale Beiträge in der Zeitschrift eine weltweite Leserschaft.
The first issue of Hermes. Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie appeared in 1866 at the publishing house of Weidmann in Berlin, giving Hermes one of the longest publishing histories of any classical studies journal today. The original editorial board included the Latinist Emil Hübner, the Hellenist Adolf Kirchhoff and the ancient historian Theodor Mommsen. Among their successors were Georg Kaibel, Carl Robert, Georg Wissowa, Alfred Körte, Helmut Berve, and Jochen Bleicken.
In addition to scholarly articles on classical philology, Hermes also publishes articles from related fields in classical and ancient studies such as ancient history, archeology, epigraphy and numismatics. Thus, the journal provides a panorama of the wide variety of research on Greco-Roman antiquity from the perspectives of literature, languages and history.
This peer-reviewed journal reaches with its stimulating international papers a worldwide readership.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Monday, July 20, 2015
Kunstler: Trump Hits a Bump.
Kunstler: Trump Hits a Bump.
W as it Donald Trump or the wolverine that lives on top of his head who made the dumb crack over the weekend about Senator John McCain not being a war hero? After all, that ambiguous patch of ginger-colored fur has taken on a life of its own. If I were Trump, I’d simply disown the remark and say that the hair-thing blurted it out, ventriloquist-style, because he (Donald) forgot to feed it that morning.
I just want to go on record to say that if John McCain is not a war hero — what with getting shot down in the Vietnam jungle and spending 5.5 years being thrashed daily by his captors — than Donald Trump is not an asshole, or a pendejo, as the landscaping crew might put it (perhaps even a maricón).
One thing the Trump campaign is proving — to the flustered consternation of the moiling herd of other candidates — is what intellectual chickenshits all mainstream American politicians are. I know it is hard to see through the prevailing rainbow fog of diversity propaganda, but the USA really does have an immigration problem. My peeps in the old Democrat fold are the worst, of course, because they are not even capable of stating the plain truth that an illegal immigrant is something more than just “undocumented,” as if some bureaucratic error were made in God’s intake stack. And the issue of legal immigration policy is simply unmentionable, of course, because being “a nation of immigrants” means never having to say enough is enough.
It’s obvious that much of the developed world is now sore beset by past immigration policy choices and by the current inrush of desperate souls fleeing the evermore general breakdown of societies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). European pols are at least willing to have the debate, unappetizing as it might be. This dreaded political dance is now occurring against the background of a probable financial breakdown across Europe. When the utopian project of the European Union fails, as seems likely now due to the sovereign debt fiasco, I suspect that we will see a renewed effort to defend national cultures — French, German, and all the rest — in a manner that has a great potential for turning ugly. Financial failure means the death of the current banking system and the disappearance of massive notional wealth, and if that isn’t a recipe for extreme nationalism (plus xenophobia) than we are truly blind to the lessons of history.
And then, of course, there is the problem of Jihad. It’s for real, and it’s on the move all over MENA, and quite a few of its faithful agents are in place across Europe to make a whole heap of trouble in the event that the Euroland project falls on its face. This is perhaps beyond the question of merely preserving national identities. I think we will live to see an era of mass expulsions, fair or not.
It is not so easy to explain why America has its head so far up its ass on the issues of immigration, but maybe it is enough to say that sixty-plus years of TV advertising have set us up to be suckers for every sort of paid shill selling a sentimental sob story for one interest or another. This seems to be true most particularly of the educated class that labors in the trenches of advertising and public relations (i.e. propaganda). They have come go believe their own bullshit absolutely. Apparently, these true-blue believers are more hostage to the narratives they are paid to spin than the ragtag followers of Trump. (We’re a nation of immigrants….)
Were I a pol, I would propose a “time-out” from immigration of all kinds. The USA did it before, in the 1920s, after a half-century of prodigious immigration when new states needed to be settled, and new industries needed to be manned, and new cities needed to be built. We are not in the same circumstances anymore. The empty places have been filled (and then some). The factories were banished to China and elsewhere. Some of America’s farming regions aren’t working out so well a hundred years later — Nebraska has been depopulating and God knows what the fate will be of California’s Central Valley as the epochal drought creeps forward. The Chinese may be building super-duper mega-cities, but every fact of coming resource scarcity suggests to me that they are making the wrong bet on that disposition of things. It ain’ happening here, anyway. Our cities (with a few exceptions) face contraction.
Unfortunately, Trump’s antics will make it only more difficult to hold a sane debate about taking that time-out from immigration. So, one alternative is an insane debate about it, one based on sheer grievance and gall rather than the responsibilities of governance. I’ve proposed for many years that we are all set up to welcome a red-white-and-blue, corn-pone Nazi political savior type. I don’t think Donald Trump is it. But he will be a stalking horse for a far more skillful demagogue when the time comes. There’s a fair chance that the wheels will come off the banking and monetary system well before the 2016 election. Who knows who or what will come out of the woodwork before then.
Meanwhile, notice today’s headline from the fabled “newspaper of record” (The New York Times):
Women Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair
Yes, these are the mighty issues that concern us most.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
Kunstler: Greek Pudding.
A standard Kunstler column on the financial situation in Greece.
Kunstler: Greek Pudding.
-----
The heat and humidity lately have been brutal.
Kunstler: Greek Pudding.
-----
The heat and humidity lately have been brutal.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
Eddy Arnold, "What a Wonderful World"
From: Songs of the Young World
Release date: January 1969
Label: RCA Victor
Thursday, July 09, 2015
The Hilo Heat Wave
Here.
Out with my friend today, we felt the heat at his house, at the bookstore, even at Ken's. But Safeway was cool.
Out with my friend today, we felt the heat at his house, at the bookstore, even at Ken's. But Safeway was cool.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
What Kunstler's Been Saying All Along
Hattie summarizes this morning's financial craziness. Kunstler has written for years of the dangers of financial collapse, especially with a system so interconnected.
"...And It Came to Pass."
"...And It Came to Pass."
Tuesday, July 07, 2015
Kunstler: Welcome to BlackSwansVille
July 6, 2015
Welcome to Blackswansville
While the folks clogging the US tattoo parlors may not have noticed, things are beginning to look a little World War one-ish out there. Except the current blossoming world conflict is being fought not with massed troops and tanks but with interest rates and repayment schedules. Germany now dawdles in reply to the gauntlet slammed down Sunday in the Greek referendum (hell) “no” vote. Germany’s immediate strategy, it appears, is to apply some good old fashioned Teutonic todesfurcht — let the Greeks simmer in their own juices for a few days while depositors suck the dwindling cash reserves from the banks and the grocery store shelves empty out. Then what?
Nobody knows. And anything can happen.
One thing we ought to know: both sides in the current skirmish are fighting reality. The Germans foolishly insist that the Greek’s meet their debt obligations. The German’s are just pissing into the wind on that one, a hazardous business for a nation of beer drinkers. The Greeks insist on living the 20th century deluxe industrial age lifestyle, complete with 24/7 electricity, cheap groceries, cushy office jobs, early retirement, and plenty of walking-around money. They’ll be lucky if they land back in the 1800s, comfort-wise.
The Greeks may not recognize this, but they are in the vanguard of a movement that is wrenching the techno-industrial nations back to much older, more local, and simpler living arrangements. The Euro, by contrast, represents the trend that is over: centralization and bigness. The big questions are whether the latter still has enough mojo left to drag out the transition process, and for how long, and how painfully.
World affairs suffer from the disease of terminal excessive complexity. To make matters worse, much of the late-phase complexity operates in the service of accounting fraud of one kind or another. The world’s banking system is mired in the unreality of so many unmeetable obligations, cooked books, three-card-monte swap gimmicks, interest rate euchres, secret arbitrages, market manipulation monkeyshines, and countless other cons, swindles, and hornswoggles that all the auditors ever born could not produce a coherent record of what has been wreaked in the life of this universe (or several parallel universes). Remember Long Term Capital Management? That’s what the world has become.
What happens in the case of untenable complexity is that it tends to unravel fast and furiously. That’s exactly why avalanches and earthquakes happen all at once, not stretched out over a six week period. The global financial scene not so different. It’s just another matrix of linked mutually-supporting relationships that can implode if a few members weaken.
One question worth reflecting on is whether the implosion is actually well underway on-the-ground in real economies, with just the scrim of illusion to make the surface appear intact. That surely seems to be the case in the USA, where the so-called economy has already avalanched into a rubble heap of part-time scut jobs, defaulted college loans, underwater mortgages, and groaning pension funds — with an overlay of pointless and endless motoring.
Over in Euroland, the Greek “no” also implies that every other sovereign nation wallowing in deep financial shit will demand a haircut (and a disinfectant shower). Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and even France cannot possibly meet their debt obligations. Their citizens are being taunted with currency controls, too, and they have every bit as much potential to go ape-y as the Greeks. Notice you haven’t heard much from their leaders and financial ministers in recent weeks. They are all standing on the sidelines watching the Greeks go through the wringer — but you can be sure they are all making plans of their own.
The failure of the European experiment will be extremely demoralizing to the hopeful citizens of that continent, who emerged from the bloodbath of the early 20th century to become the world’s premier peaceful tourist theme park. I don’t know that they necessarily have to go back to fighting each other on battlefields with things that blow up and destroy human flesh, but they surely have to decentralize and re-fashion some kind of simpler, local way-of-life if they expect to remain civilized.
It’ll happen everywhere. The Japanese are next, of course, and they may be the most fortunate, since they retain more than a few shreds of memory for exactly that mode of life: the Tokugawa shogunate (the Edo period, 1600 – 1853), a manner of high pre-industrial economy and culture that might have persisted indefinitely had not Commodore Perry come knocking on their door, so to speak, in his “black ships.”
Ukraine is about halfway back to being medieval with excellent potential to overshoot even that. The Euroland PIIG(F) nations don’t have the energy resources to extend Modernity, even if the banking system wasn’t terminally ill, and then on top of that they have the ethno-demographic quandary of creeping Muslimization — plus the additional flotillas of desperate boat people arriving daily.
America, count your blessings. Tattoos, obesity, drug use, and shiftlessness are all basically behavioral choices. You don’t need a finance minister or a central banker to overcome those problems.
Welcome to Blackswansville
While the folks clogging the US tattoo parlors may not have noticed, things are beginning to look a little World War one-ish out there. Except the current blossoming world conflict is being fought not with massed troops and tanks but with interest rates and repayment schedules. Germany now dawdles in reply to the gauntlet slammed down Sunday in the Greek referendum (hell) “no” vote. Germany’s immediate strategy, it appears, is to apply some good old fashioned Teutonic todesfurcht — let the Greeks simmer in their own juices for a few days while depositors suck the dwindling cash reserves from the banks and the grocery store shelves empty out. Then what?
Nobody knows. And anything can happen.
One thing we ought to know: both sides in the current skirmish are fighting reality. The Germans foolishly insist that the Greek’s meet their debt obligations. The German’s are just pissing into the wind on that one, a hazardous business for a nation of beer drinkers. The Greeks insist on living the 20th century deluxe industrial age lifestyle, complete with 24/7 electricity, cheap groceries, cushy office jobs, early retirement, and plenty of walking-around money. They’ll be lucky if they land back in the 1800s, comfort-wise.
The Greeks may not recognize this, but they are in the vanguard of a movement that is wrenching the techno-industrial nations back to much older, more local, and simpler living arrangements. The Euro, by contrast, represents the trend that is over: centralization and bigness. The big questions are whether the latter still has enough mojo left to drag out the transition process, and for how long, and how painfully.
World affairs suffer from the disease of terminal excessive complexity. To make matters worse, much of the late-phase complexity operates in the service of accounting fraud of one kind or another. The world’s banking system is mired in the unreality of so many unmeetable obligations, cooked books, three-card-monte swap gimmicks, interest rate euchres, secret arbitrages, market manipulation monkeyshines, and countless other cons, swindles, and hornswoggles that all the auditors ever born could not produce a coherent record of what has been wreaked in the life of this universe (or several parallel universes). Remember Long Term Capital Management? That’s what the world has become.
What happens in the case of untenable complexity is that it tends to unravel fast and furiously. That’s exactly why avalanches and earthquakes happen all at once, not stretched out over a six week period. The global financial scene not so different. It’s just another matrix of linked mutually-supporting relationships that can implode if a few members weaken.
One question worth reflecting on is whether the implosion is actually well underway on-the-ground in real economies, with just the scrim of illusion to make the surface appear intact. That surely seems to be the case in the USA, where the so-called economy has already avalanched into a rubble heap of part-time scut jobs, defaulted college loans, underwater mortgages, and groaning pension funds — with an overlay of pointless and endless motoring.
Over in Euroland, the Greek “no” also implies that every other sovereign nation wallowing in deep financial shit will demand a haircut (and a disinfectant shower). Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and even France cannot possibly meet their debt obligations. Their citizens are being taunted with currency controls, too, and they have every bit as much potential to go ape-y as the Greeks. Notice you haven’t heard much from their leaders and financial ministers in recent weeks. They are all standing on the sidelines watching the Greeks go through the wringer — but you can be sure they are all making plans of their own.
The failure of the European experiment will be extremely demoralizing to the hopeful citizens of that continent, who emerged from the bloodbath of the early 20th century to become the world’s premier peaceful tourist theme park. I don’t know that they necessarily have to go back to fighting each other on battlefields with things that blow up and destroy human flesh, but they surely have to decentralize and re-fashion some kind of simpler, local way-of-life if they expect to remain civilized.
It’ll happen everywhere. The Japanese are next, of course, and they may be the most fortunate, since they retain more than a few shreds of memory for exactly that mode of life: the Tokugawa shogunate (the Edo period, 1600 – 1853), a manner of high pre-industrial economy and culture that might have persisted indefinitely had not Commodore Perry come knocking on their door, so to speak, in his “black ships.”
Ukraine is about halfway back to being medieval with excellent potential to overshoot even that. The Euroland PIIG(F) nations don’t have the energy resources to extend Modernity, even if the banking system wasn’t terminally ill, and then on top of that they have the ethno-demographic quandary of creeping Muslimization — plus the additional flotillas of desperate boat people arriving daily.
America, count your blessings. Tattoos, obesity, drug use, and shiftlessness are all basically behavioral choices. You don’t need a finance minister or a central banker to overcome those problems.
Monday, July 06, 2015
Kunstler: Featured Eyesore of the Month
Kunstler's running late with his weekly column, but below is a link to his featured eyesore of the month, namely a failed appending of a modern condo to a traditional church.
Kunstler: Featured Eyesore of the Month
7 July update: In a comment below, Hattie implies the church is ugly, and not made ugly with the addition of the condo tower. How so? I ask.
Kunstler: Featured Eyesore of the Month
7 July update: In a comment below, Hattie implies the church is ugly, and not made ugly with the addition of the condo tower. How so? I ask.
Neither Jeb Nor Hillary!
Jeb or Hillary will continue destruction of humanity. @GlenFordBAR "They all lie for a living and they live to lie." https://t.co/CYZmJ0tbTc
— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) July 3, 2015Saturday, July 04, 2015
Thursday, July 02, 2015
Happy #CanadaDay, Canadians!
Also, I imagine this is a daily occurrence for you. pic.twitter.com/qI8jLOFvod
— NonProphetess (@nonprophetess) July 1, 2015Wednesday, July 01, 2015
Done with Work.. For Now
The last two weeks were very busy for me. Doing a column and working on a newsletter. Now I'm trying to catch up on work at home. I still plan to write of my trip to Sacramento last summer.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Kunstler: Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
Overnight, I saw news that Greece is closing her banks for six days, and may exit the Eurozone, making her the first country to do so.--P.Z.
Kunstler: Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
“The problem with the post-2007 world is that we are not in a cyclical recovery; we are in a structural depression defined as a sustained period of below-trend growth with no end in sight. The U.S. has caught the Japanese disease. Structural depressions are not amenable to monetary solutions, they require structural solutions.”
–James Rickards
Can anyone stabilize this bitch? At daybreak, anyway, the Federal Reserve governors were all bagging Z’s in their trundle beds. Maybe after a few pumpkin lattes they’ll jump in and tell their trading shills to BTFD. The soma-like perma-trance among those who follow markets and money matters appears to be ending abruptly with the recognition that sometimes robots and humans alike run shrieking to the exit. A pity when they get to the door and discover it opens onto a cliff-edge. Look out below.
All this trouble with money comes from one meta problem: aggregate industrial growth has ended. It has stopped more in some parts of the world than others, while in the USA it has actually been contracting. The cause is simple: the end of cheap energy, oil in particular. At over $70-a-barrel the price kills economies; under $70-a-barrel the price kills oil production. The bottom line is that, in the broadest sense, the world can no longer count on getting more stuff, except waste, garbage, political unrest, and the other various effects of entropy. From now on, there is only less of everything for a global population that has not stopped growing. The folks on-board are still having sex, of course, which has a certain byproduct.
This dynamic was plain to see a decade ago, but the people who run finance and governments thought it would be a good idea to maintain the appearance of growth via the usufruct mechanisms of central banking: ZIRP, QE, market intervention, and universal accounting fraud. It’s not working so well. Debt was generated in place of the missing growth, and now there is too much of it that can’t be repaid on a coherent schedule. Many nations, parties, and entities are in trouble with debt and the prospective defaults are starting to pile up like SUVs on a fog-bound highway. Greece is just the first one fishtailing into a guard-rail.
The magic moment will come when it becomes obvious that these systemic quandaries have no solution. The system itself is programmed for implosion, in particular and most immediately the banking sector, where most of the untruth and illusion is lodged these days. As it stands exposed, the people are compelled to shake off their faith in what it represents: order, authority, trust. Institutions fail and each failure acts as a black hole, sucking air, light, and even time out of the system.
In the natural course of things, structural reform can occur, but that natural course entails some degree of disorder and loss. If Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs founders a lot of people will be living in their cars — a first stop perhaps to not living at all. Sooner or later, though, the survivors will all have to live differently. Structural reform means, for instance, that you can no longer count on getting food the way you were used to getting it. No more 3000-mile Caesar salads and take-out tubs of Kung Po Chicken. That will be very traumatic in the early going. Eventually in the places where it is possible to grow food on a smaller scale, it will be done. Maybe not so much in the Central Valley of California anymore, but in other places: Ohio, Michigan, even New Jersey (“the garden state”). And once grown, it will be sold by means that differ from the supermarket.
Americans think that WalMart and its brethren are here to stay. They’re mistaken. Structural reform means reorganizing many layers of commerce around town centers — Main Streets — while the disintegrating strip malls await the salvage crews. Are we ready for that? Rebuilding local economies would put a lot of people back to work doing real things. All the blabber about “job creation” for the moment is only about increasing the share price of predatory corporations and the bonuses of their mendacious executives. Will the world miss them? Can we still make some things and move them around and put them up for sale? I think so.
Are you disturbed about the pervasive racketeering in health care (so-called) and higher education. Well, those grifts are eating themselves alive. Structural reform probably means far fewer and smaller colleges and far more and smaller local clinics free of the stupendous insurance chicanery that mystifies the public while it swindles them. There will be a lot of useful work for people who want to take care of other people, and certainly fewer MRIs.
Do you fear the end of mass motoring and the suburban infrastructure that it operates in? Maybe your children and their children will be happier in walkable neighborhoods — outlandish as that sounds. There is a hell of lot of rebuilding to do. It may not involve materials like strand-board and vinyl siding, but the newer and smaller buildings will probably last a whole lot longer and look better. And a lot of hands will be needed to do the work.
Will we ever again know banking on the JP Morgan scale? Not on any horizon I can imagine. But there are other ways to establish mediums of exchange, stores of value, and pricing mechanisms. You can be sure that banking will never again occupy 40 percent of gross economic activity in this land.
Today may not be the true event horizon for our diseased status quo, but it is probably, at least, the coming attraction trailer. Try not get puked on.
Kunstler: Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
“The problem with the post-2007 world is that we are not in a cyclical recovery; we are in a structural depression defined as a sustained period of below-trend growth with no end in sight. The U.S. has caught the Japanese disease. Structural depressions are not amenable to monetary solutions, they require structural solutions.”
–James Rickards
Can anyone stabilize this bitch? At daybreak, anyway, the Federal Reserve governors were all bagging Z’s in their trundle beds. Maybe after a few pumpkin lattes they’ll jump in and tell their trading shills to BTFD. The soma-like perma-trance among those who follow markets and money matters appears to be ending abruptly with the recognition that sometimes robots and humans alike run shrieking to the exit. A pity when they get to the door and discover it opens onto a cliff-edge. Look out below.
All this trouble with money comes from one meta problem: aggregate industrial growth has ended. It has stopped more in some parts of the world than others, while in the USA it has actually been contracting. The cause is simple: the end of cheap energy, oil in particular. At over $70-a-barrel the price kills economies; under $70-a-barrel the price kills oil production. The bottom line is that, in the broadest sense, the world can no longer count on getting more stuff, except waste, garbage, political unrest, and the other various effects of entropy. From now on, there is only less of everything for a global population that has not stopped growing. The folks on-board are still having sex, of course, which has a certain byproduct.
This dynamic was plain to see a decade ago, but the people who run finance and governments thought it would be a good idea to maintain the appearance of growth via the usufruct mechanisms of central banking: ZIRP, QE, market intervention, and universal accounting fraud. It’s not working so well. Debt was generated in place of the missing growth, and now there is too much of it that can’t be repaid on a coherent schedule. Many nations, parties, and entities are in trouble with debt and the prospective defaults are starting to pile up like SUVs on a fog-bound highway. Greece is just the first one fishtailing into a guard-rail.
The magic moment will come when it becomes obvious that these systemic quandaries have no solution. The system itself is programmed for implosion, in particular and most immediately the banking sector, where most of the untruth and illusion is lodged these days. As it stands exposed, the people are compelled to shake off their faith in what it represents: order, authority, trust. Institutions fail and each failure acts as a black hole, sucking air, light, and even time out of the system.
In the natural course of things, structural reform can occur, but that natural course entails some degree of disorder and loss. If Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs founders a lot of people will be living in their cars — a first stop perhaps to not living at all. Sooner or later, though, the survivors will all have to live differently. Structural reform means, for instance, that you can no longer count on getting food the way you were used to getting it. No more 3000-mile Caesar salads and take-out tubs of Kung Po Chicken. That will be very traumatic in the early going. Eventually in the places where it is possible to grow food on a smaller scale, it will be done. Maybe not so much in the Central Valley of California anymore, but in other places: Ohio, Michigan, even New Jersey (“the garden state”). And once grown, it will be sold by means that differ from the supermarket.
Americans think that WalMart and its brethren are here to stay. They’re mistaken. Structural reform means reorganizing many layers of commerce around town centers — Main Streets — while the disintegrating strip malls await the salvage crews. Are we ready for that? Rebuilding local economies would put a lot of people back to work doing real things. All the blabber about “job creation” for the moment is only about increasing the share price of predatory corporations and the bonuses of their mendacious executives. Will the world miss them? Can we still make some things and move them around and put them up for sale? I think so.
Are you disturbed about the pervasive racketeering in health care (so-called) and higher education. Well, those grifts are eating themselves alive. Structural reform probably means far fewer and smaller colleges and far more and smaller local clinics free of the stupendous insurance chicanery that mystifies the public while it swindles them. There will be a lot of useful work for people who want to take care of other people, and certainly fewer MRIs.
Do you fear the end of mass motoring and the suburban infrastructure that it operates in? Maybe your children and their children will be happier in walkable neighborhoods — outlandish as that sounds. There is a hell of lot of rebuilding to do. It may not involve materials like strand-board and vinyl siding, but the newer and smaller buildings will probably last a whole lot longer and look better. And a lot of hands will be needed to do the work.
Will we ever again know banking on the JP Morgan scale? Not on any horizon I can imagine. But there are other ways to establish mediums of exchange, stores of value, and pricing mechanisms. You can be sure that banking will never again occupy 40 percent of gross economic activity in this land.
Today may not be the true event horizon for our diseased status quo, but it is probably, at least, the coming attraction trailer. Try not get puked on.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Is India’s foreign policy at a cusp? http://t.co/yWzYYu0ZUp Via @OUPPolitics #politics #NarendraModi
— Oxford Academic (@OUPAcademic) June 28, 2015Friday, June 26, 2015
Don Lemon
.@donlemon to have @glennbeck on to discuss race. This is how you know you're in the final throes of your career. #p2 pic.twitter.com/IIINaF846o
— PoliticalGroove (@PoliticalGroove) June 24, 2015The aptly-named Don Lemon.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
One of three prominent disgraces to the Indian people. (The others being Bobby Jindal and Dharun Ravi.)
TIL these are actual photos of South Carolina's current Governor. pic.twitter.com/cZma3Thasq
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) June 18, 2015The Economics of Hollywood
Louis Proyect discusses the economics of the movies.
The book was published in 2010 and I plan to read it soon.
-----
1 July update: I picked it up at the library yesterday. The book, by Edward Jay Epstein, is titled The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
The South Asian America Digital Archive
Another organization worth checking out is the South Asian America Digital Archive.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Kunstler: Enter Jeb and Hil
It doesn't have to be, if people vote for better candidates in the primary. Otherwise, these are the two we're stuck with. Then expect a surge in third-party voting, or more likely, voters not even bothering to choose either.
Kunstler: Enter Jeb and Hil.
Kunstler: Enter Jeb and Hil.
Friday, June 12, 2015
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Various Tweets With Hashtag Commentary
In which http://t.co/hFOq1WJ767's Justin Raimondo defends Tiananmen Square massacre as a victory for capitalism http://t.co/ogYXAztIVa
— exiledonline.com (@exiledonline) June 5, 2015It's like a menu with too many items and yet nothing sounds remotely good. #GOP candidates. pic.twitter.com/GVP5lZbP1r
— bennydiego (@bennydiego) May 30, 2015#Dem candidates
Rowe on like CNBC in the midst of the Great Recession being like "we got tons of good dirty jobs out there right now." [dim anchors nod]
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) June 9, 2015Every Memorial Day is in fact a remembrance of terrible parenting. @jeffspross @DouthatNYT @DamonLinker
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) June 4, 2015
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